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Dark is the Morning

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Dark is the Morning

By: Rupert Thomson
Narrated by: Rupert Thomson
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$8.99/month after 3 months. Cancel anytime. Offer ends on 29 July 2026 at 11:59 AEST.

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Bloomsbury presents Dark is the Morning, written and read by Rupert Thomson.

Sometimes love isn’t where you belong

In a mountain village in the Abruzzo region of Italy, Gino, a troubled young man, realises that his childhood sweetheart Franca can give his life the happiness and stability he needs. They seem made for each other, and move to a remote house in the countryside - but there is something in Franca’s past that haunts Gino.

Descending into pathological jealousy and resentment towards a married man who had been Franca’s lover, Gino is unable to stop himself imagining the worst, and embarks on a violent path that has catastrophic consequences.

Shifting between tenderness and paranoia, beauty and tragedy, this is an extraordinary novel from one of the UK’s most unpredictable and celebrated writers.©2026 Rupert Thomson (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Thriller & Suspense
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Critic Reviews

A wonderfully moody, moving novel, shot through with sadness and with strangeness, and with a simmering power entirely its own.
Lyrical, intense, and haunting, Thomson's Italian psychodrama displays incredible narrative mastery and has the elegance and fluency of a fable. So beautifully written.
Beautiful and seething. I liked it deeply.
An extraordinary writer
Utterly gripping. There isn’t a writer on the planet who mines the precariousness of the human condition with such terrifying power and clarity.
Gripping
Compelling ... an unsettling fable of a romance infected by obsessive jealousy. Themes of love, magic and madness play out with Rapunzel vibes, wreathed in woodsmoke.
Thomson's skill is to layer his trademark style of stunned, post-traumatic prose with the seething energy of gossip and paranoia ... It is perhaps the ideal holiday read: frictionless at the level of the sentence; stealthy, romantic and utterly unpredictable in every other way.
A beautifully wrought, achingly sad exposition of flawed and frail humanity
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