For three and a half years, calamities hit Elizabeth Knox and family in rapid succession. Her sister suffered a psychotic break and was hospitalised against her will, her husband’s brother died by violence, and her mother was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. 

In time, she was able to write about it.

Night, Ma is a book about the net of family which people are held by, but also slip through. About the actual daily work of love; the physical and cognitive work love requires. 

Knox is a beloved storyteller who has given us other worlds; now she invites us into her own. With characteristic generosity and transcendence, she guides us through time, illness, loss, and the loneliness of unutterable experiences.

Night, Ma offers the gift of seeing as Elizabeth sees.

'Absolutely brilliant. This radiant, radically honest memoir pulls the pin on a sequence of domestic grenades, from the perils of semi-feral childhood to a cruelly compacted series of family crises that, like shock waves, sweep all before. Armed with inimitable wit, the consolation of cats and a forensic gaze that spares no one, least of all herself, Knox interrogates the act of caring; the ties that burn and bind, that we somehow survive.' —Diana Wichtel

'An unforgettable record of love and pain, as wide and deep as the ocean and as mighty. There is such life in this, such wit and goodness. Telling the truth of how we are, all of us, trembling on the edge of a great and terrible mystery.' —Noelle McCarthy

'The prodigious skill of the accomplished and singular prose stylist is married with a scarily good memory and a shimmering humanity [...] It is nothing less than the best of literature about the worst of times.' — Claire Mabey, The Spinoff

'Night, Ma is a remarkable and remarkably honest book.' — Sally Blundell, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books

'Such magnificent writing, and it never really lets up. Not in quality and not in emotional intensity.' — Philip Matthews, ReadingRoom

'Lucid, informative, and a joy to read. It is the memoir of a novelist with her attendant descriptive powers and incisive observations well in play, as the past and the everyday are recalled with splendid clarity.' — Chris Baskett, The Listener

Elizabeth Knox is the bestselling author of fourteen novels, most recently the young adult novel Kings of this World, three autobiographical novellas, and a collection of personal essays, The Love School. Her best-known books are The Vintner’s Luck; YA novels Dreamhunter, Dreamquake, and Mortal Fire; and The Absolute Book. Elizabeth was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM) in 2020. 

Cover: Todd Atticus