This can be hard to read in spot because the underlying plot driver is a real terrorist attack. It's well done, though. Thanks for the ARC.

NetGalley provided a digital ARC for my use.
It's been quite a while since I read this book, but it stuck with me. It tells the stories of multiple people who were involved in the Bataclan mass shooting. The alternating perspectives were a little frustrating-with everything going on, I wanted to finish one story to its end before starting another-but it helped keep me engaged in the book.

Weaving in and out of the lives of 10 different characters before and after the tragedy they experienced, this dramatic, powerful narrative is compelling and very well-told. it really managed to portray the horrors that are sure to follow and experienced in such moments.
Highly recommend!

One Night in November is a tour de force: a novelistic rendering of the attacks that took place in Paris on November 13, 2015. The attacks took place at, among other places, the Eagles of Death Metal concert in the Bataclan theatre. Amélie Antoine has focused her attention on ten fictional lives, of those who attended the concert, following their narratives from before to during the attacks and to afterward. Maintaining interest and pace throughout, we are drawn into these lives.

Antoine states in an afterward that the novel is neither a personal account nor an essay, and is “not exactly a novel” as it is “too heavily based on reality for that. Instead, it is “quite simply an attempt to … to make something bright from the from the darkness. “I believe that it is writing’s role to reinvent reality, exorcise it and transcend it, to make it less terrifyingly dark, more approachable.”

And in imagining the lives of these ten – from a husband and wife on a date night, to a young gay boy experiencing his father’s rejection, to a rebellious teenager, to a man going solo to the concert, for instance – Antonine has brought the effect of terror home in a way that news reports cannot do. She imagines the fear experienced in the stadium in vivid, horrific detail. And she shines a light on the sometimes tenuous burden of survival, and the toll that survival and recovery take too: “We can’t stop living. And they didn’t, not even when they sometimes felt like the simple things— eating, going out, talking, sleeping, and even breathing— took all their strength and energy, like they had to relearn how to do it all.”

In the end though, survival and moving forward is all that there is. Antoine, again in the afterward, writes about this generation brought up without wars, but is now, “A generation devoid of illusions, but so very full of dreams. A generation that can now add terrorism to the list of things to fear, to the list of things we must fight and stand tall against.”

This dramatic, powerful narrative is compellingly and well-told. It’s real in its illumination of the horror of terror through the quotidian lives it highlights. It’s an astonishing feat of story-telling.

I really enjoyed the way this was written. I was able to read so many different perspectives from that one night- what happened before, at, and after the attack in Paris. The author wrote in a way that made the stories believable and honored the victims beautifully.

A bold reselling of the Paris terrorist attacks. The author uses her characters skilfully to make you envisage the feelings of being caught up in an attack and explores the effect this has on them during and after the incident.

I requested this book from NetGalley when I saw in on there because I’m really drawn to books about trauma at the moment, as I work through the remaining aspects of my own PTSD. I find it helps me to read how others have found ways to live with it, to recover from it or just how they’ve coped.

One Night in November is a work of fiction that looks at characters that became caught up in the terrorist attack at the Bataclan in Paris in 2015. Amelie Antoine takes a real cross-section of people from all walks of life and, as such, makes this such a believable and heartbreaking read.

The book really drew me in quickly. Knowing what happened that night in Paris at the Bataclan meant there was a real sense of apprehension reading about these people – so much so that when I started reading I had completely blanked on the fact that this book is a work of fiction and I believed I was reading true accounts. It became clear in the second section that this is a novel and I found it very unsettling. This is a very difficult book to read, especially with the attack being so recent, and I had to put the book down quite a few times to gather myself. The descriptions are graphic at times, and very believable and this made me really uncomfortable because it felt so real. I wasn’t sure when I finished reading if this was a book I would be able to review.

To be fair to the author though her writing is engaging and she does hook you in very quickly. Her exploration of how fear affects different people and how we might behave in such an extreme situation is well done. I’ve had people say to me about my experiences that led to my PTSD that they wouldn’t have coped as well as I did but the fact is that none of us know how we’ll cope until we’re in it. We might think we’ll be brave and actually we freeze, or we might think we’d never cope and we find reserves we never knew we had. I do think the author captured this quite well. There is a sense of how people begin to make sense of what they’ve survived in the aftermath too and, for the most part, I found this interesting. She looks at survivor guilt; at the way some people feel a sense of how short life is and go on to live at million miles an hour; at the way some people just can’t seem to function, can’t seem to cope with what normality is anymore. I appreciated her looking at this in the way she did.

This is a very powerful and incredibly moving book and ultimately, I did really appreciate the author’s beautiful and engaging writing style and will look out for more of her books in the future.

One Night in November is out now.

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book was heartwarming and emotional, and the intention of the writer behind writing it felt so real and honest. Thus, it really pains me to give it anything less than 5 stars. However, as much as I could connect with it on an emotional level, there were so many things which could've made this a better read.

The plot was based on a real life tragedy and I loved the concept of the ten characters and their interwoven lives as well as the structuring of the book. However, the writing was not up to par, and I was sorely disappointed in the translation. Sentence structuring was also butchered by the translator. There was also too much telling and not enough showing, e.g."Clara is an awesome friend and so laid-back."

Furthermore, I really wanted this book to address Islamophobia, which is a key aspect of a tragedy like the Paris attack but sadly it didn't and at times it even clearly reinforced the idea of the 'model' Muslim terrorist shouting Allahu Akbar at the top of his lungs and killing people. I understand that since this was a tribute to the Paris attack, that had to be done, but I still cannot help myself from condemning this use of media stereotypes.

Overall, a succinct read, full of realism and emotions, failed by the translation and at times the writing.

An insightful read and one I think everyone should get around to.
The author's Afterword really summons up my feelings in regards to this novel:
“One Night in November is my tribute to the victims and their loved ones. More than anything else, however, it’s a call to remember, because we will forget soon, too soon; we’ll move on to other things, like we always do. It’s the candle I humbly light, with the hope that it will withstand the wind and the passage of time.
I hope that my words will do some good. That my characters are a worthy tribute to all the victims of November 13, 2015.
To those who didn’t survive, and to those who continue to fight to live their lives.
May we never forget.”

This is a moving and powerful response to the terrorist attack on the Bataclan in Paris in November 2015, when so many were killed or injured, and is a fitting tribute to all those affected by the tragedy, victims and families alike. The author take a disparate group of fictional characters and in a series of vignettes shows them getting ready for and going to the event, what happens to them during the attack and how they cope in the aftermath. I certainly shed a tear at one point, as although these are indeed fictional characters they all seem so real in their responses that the reader could easily mistake the book for a non-fiction account. Compelling reading indeed.

I loved this book. I couldn't put it down. Great characters and really well written. A great quick read

In this book, Amelie Antoine tells the story of several Frenchmen and women who experiences the terrorist attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris. She begins by telling the reader something about the characters and how and why they got the tickets to the music concert by a well-known, popular band at the Bataclan music club. Each character has his/her own reasons for going to the concert, which are all interesting to learn. The book then shifts to the concert, where the attack occurs, taking the reader through the fear, anger, strength and caring shown by everyone in attendance, not just the small group of characters, all of whom figure prominently in the narrative. In conclusion, the author describes the aftermath of the attacks and their effect on these characters, the country and the world.

The book gives the reader a good picture of what happened that night in Paris and how it affected everyone there as well as others related to those in attendance. It was fascinating to read how the author pictured things going down. The characters, though not as well as defined as they could have been, were defined enough to give the reader a sense of who they were and to appreciate their emotions during the attack and afterward. This book provides a good, easily readable historical perspective of this horrendous attack and should send a warning of just how deadly terrorist attacks are and can be for those involved as well as for the entire country and world.