Sleep Before Evening

Magdalena Ball Prize winning author of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction

photo credit: Wade Maguire

Author Biography

Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader.
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Sleep Before Evening

Synopsis:

Marianne is the apple of Grandpa's eye - but her life's rotten to the core. When her parents suddenly disconnect her grandfather-mentor's respirator, it's as though her own life support has been unplugged. And the gifted teenager from a manicured, middle-class suburb hits the city back-streets, and the skids. Magdalena Ball's heart-wrenching novel - released on 24th July 2007 by BeWrite Books - tells the story of the teenager's struggle against a self-centred artist mother, a succession of drive-by stepfathers, her desperate escape into a nightmare of drugs and sexual degradation ... and her struggle not to Sleep Before Evening. Set in and about New York, the gritty, relentless tale unfolds with the same cool detachment that motivates the central character to peel back the layers of her life and expose the painful scalding within. There are lonely vigils in city parks and subway journeys to oblivion. In the city she meets Miles, a hip musician busking the streets and playing seedy venues with a rock band. Her new, exciting, dissolute world challenges Marianne's preconceptions about art and life. Here, in contrast to her prescribed upbringing, she finds anarchic squalor, home grown music and poetry, substance abuse, sex and crushing disappointment and fear; but above all, exhilarating personal freedom. Addictions - of all kinds - and the redemptive power of art and music, love, loss and beauty are all explored in a young girl's difficult journey from sleep to awakening.