There is a scene that takes place in 1959, where Annie and Ruth are asked to assist with a patient who is having electric therapy (or electric shock treatment as we know it today). Along with one of the interns they have to hold her down, while she is ‘shocked’. I had to stop reading. My mother had this treatment in the 50s. I never knew they had to be held down. She later had a leucotomy and this also occurs at Fairlee Hall, where the girls are training to be ‘mental nurses’.

In the side wards, patients are receiving treatment to make them ‘normal’. This, we discover later on, was a means of treating homosexuals with emetics and images of young men, all designed to deter them. The alternative was prison as it was still illegal to be actively gay in the UK until 1967. Alan Turing was chemically castrated in 1952 for homosexual acts, again as an alternative to prison.

As student nurses, Annie and Ruth have to do as they are told, but at what point do they question the rules and ask themselves if what they are doing is wrong. Are they complicit in something morally questionable? Many years ago I worked in a nursing home where dementia patients were forced to use the toilet with two HCAs holding them down and removing their clothing. I was very upset about it. Nowadays, it would be considered an assault.

In 1983, Annie is widowed and is a single mother to 13-year-old Rosie. One day she meets a young man named Robbie and his older friend Jim, and gives them a home when no-one else will, because this is the AIDs crisis, and homosexual men are shunned by society, people terrified of ‘catching’ it. And Annie needs the rent money from all her spare rooms. But soon her home becomes a haven for those dying of AIDs, and mostly they do. Sometimes their own parents have shunned them as well as society.

It’s 2020 and it’s the time of the pandemic. The country has been locked down. I usually hate stories that take place during the pandemic, but it’s necessary here to draw parallels with the AIDs crisis in the 80s. How they were dealt with and how much has changed.

Annie is now in her eighties. She lives alone. She talks to Rosie every day on the phone. Rosie thinks she should come to stay with her, that she is too vulnerable on her own. She also talks to Jim, who of all her lodgers, has survived AIDs, though he will always be HIV positive.

The book is not written in that order though. We start with a phone call in 2020, and then move around the timelines as the story progresses. It’s a very powerful novel that questions whether following the rules is always the right thing to do, even when we know it’s wrong, and can we atone by trying to right the wrongs. Even though the 1959 parts were hard for me to read, I really enjoyed the book (if that’s the right word).

Many thanks to @Tr4cyF3nt0n for inviting me to be part of the #CompulsiveReaders #blogtour and to NetGalley for an ARC.

Hold Back the Night is a powerful and emotion-charged story of one woman’s sixty-year journey from complicity and betrayal to atonement and ultimately redemption. It’s a riveting read, exposing shameful truths from the past that most people today will be ignorant of.

Annie’s story is told over three timelines, starting with Covid lockdown in 2020, when news of the death of a friend, sends her mind spiraling back to the past — to 1959, when she worked as a junior nurse in a mental institution. And to the early 1980s, when as a young widow and single mum, she provided lodgings and care to young men dying of AIDS.

Through Annie, Jessica Moor writes unflinchingly about the barbaric practice of conversion therapy, which was inflicted on gay men to ‘cure’ them of their ‘condition’, and of the abandonment of the same group two decades later at the start of the AIDS pandemic.

I loved Annie’s character arc, which sees her start off as a naïve and compliant 19 year-old, following orders and assisting in the conversion treatments. Although complicit, she does have a sympathetic side and tries to make life easier for the men. But, it’s not until many years later that she faces up to her guilt.

Offering up her home to AIDS victims begins as a mutual convenience: Annie needs lodgers, and they need a refuge. But she goes above and beyond the obligations of a landlady. Whether this is Annie subconsciously seeking atonement or just her compassionate nature isn’t clear, but I found it wonderful to see her act so selflessly and find a new purpose in life.

Redemption finally comes in the closing chapters, when Annie gets the chance to make peace with the actions of her younger self. This was full-on, lump-in-the-throat stuff and a fitting end to what was an engaging and eye-opening read.

If you’ve read and been moved by Ruth Coker Burks’ heart-wrenching memoir, All the Young Men, then Hold Back the Night is for you.

Hold Back the Night is a beautifully rich sumptuous story, following nurse Annie’s life through three key stages of her life and three recent historic events.

It covers her 20s in 1959 when she was a nurse in a mental health facility and meets her best friend Rita. They start off working on cavernous wards full of dementia patients, 50 or 60 in a room , some of whom have been there since childhood and become dreadfully institutionalised. It reminded me of Maggie O’Farrell ‘The vanishing act of Esme Lennox’.

Annie and Rita are specially selected to help with treating men for their homosexuality, in a time when it was considered utterly deviant to be gay .

The story moves to the early 80s where widowed Annie is living with her teenage daughter Rosie. A chance encounter in a hospital waiting room makes her see how badly society still treats gay men, particularly if they may have AIDs. Annie starts offering shelter to young men with HIV when they have nowhere else to go.

Finally we see Annie as an 80 year old in the early days of Covid, being careful to take her prescribed walk but staying isolated and safe. She finds out that Rita has died and it’s clear that the two have drifted over the decades although we don’t know why.

The three timelines are intertwined and we jump between the 50s to 2020 and back again, learning more about Annie and her life choices as we go. At times Annie blindly follows instructions, trusting that society is making the right decisions or trusting her husband to make the right choices but at other times she ploughs her own furrow, as she chooses to support and house the gay men despite her neighbours’ objections. It’s a tale of how past actions can play out in ways that you might never anticipate, taking you in unexpected directions and decisions.

Hold Back the Night is a mature look at one woman’s life and how her choices have shaped her& others, definitely worth a read.

This is a novel with a complex narrative, so you have to concentrate, but it’s worth the effort. Set in 3 timescales it’s a story of friendship, love, prejudice and imperfect people doing the best they can.

This was an intense read. I have seen comments that Annie was too distant and cold a narrator but I liked that she was almost a bystander, unable and sometimes unwilling to do anything to change things, as this was the reality - so many people did turn a blind eye or go along with the status quo.
I thought it was brilliantly written and would make a great tv drama.

Hold Back The Night is a story about Annie. A nurse. It's a narrative of her life in the 50s as a mental health nurse in Fairlie Hall. In the 80s she becomes a landlady to a host of sick young men. And, now in 2020 she is looking back at her life.

The themes in this story are heavy. Jessica Moor the author relays through Annie's story themes of mental health, AIDS, conversion therapy and the whole history of society and its homophobia. I really enjoyed, if that is the right word for it. The look into the 1950s and how doctors went about treating men who merely didn't conform to the social norm of loving a woman. Some scenes in the book are harrowing but it's a fact that this actually happened.

In the 1980s narrative. Annie takes in men and young boys who are dying from AIDS. Again Moor touches on how society was back then. How people perceived those with HIV. A virus that was feared among many.

The only thing I didn't get from this book was raw emotion. I thought I'd be in tears reading. But, I think because Annie herself was a cold character it made it hard to invest emotionally into the story.

Now, Rita on the other hand I really enjoyed her character. And would have loved to read more about her. She seemed more in tune with what was going on in Fairlie Hall and in a way she was light years ahead of her contemporaries. Annie should have been more Rita. But, this also showed how easily people see things differently.

Hold Back The Night dealt with some hard hitting topics and it does make you feel glad that we have come a long way in our thinking. Thankfully.

Oh my days, this book nearly broke me...
We start in March 2020 - at the beginning of lockdown. Annie lives alone and has way too much time on her hands. She starts to think back on her life, as I think we all did at that time, I certainly did! This reminiscing steps up a gear when she receives a phone call informing her of the death of her old friend, Rita. And so we go back... to 1959 when Annie first met Rita when they both started work at Fairlie Hall mental hospital as second year placement nurses.
We also delve into the 1980s at a time when Annie has just lost her husband who died suddenly in a tragic work accident. A chance encounter has her opening up her home to a young man who is ill. Her nursing skills a bit rusty but the intention still being strong.
And so begins a rather emotionally harrowing story which encompasses the conversion/aversion therapy of the late 50s, as well as the much better known AIDS crisis of the 80s. It's all a bit shocking for those who had little idea of the real impact this stuff had on people. I am more familiar with the latter than the former but I did a bit of googling and was extremely shocked at what I discovered outwith this story.
The way that the author has constructed the book, the way she weaves the three timelines around and about each other is absolutely perfect. We get the story progressing in the present day with explanation and background delivered by the injection of the past.
The story contained herein is very characters driven and boy does this author write some great characters. I have already seen this in her previous books, The Keeper and Young Women, and the ones in this book are no exception to this.
One thing to also mention is that despite the harrowing themes that this book includes, it never gets too dark. There is always a light shining out, always some hope, and the tears I shed during reading it were both tears of joy as well as sorrow. Yes I did get a bit over involved in the characters' lives. Hard not to when they are so compelling and easy to connect to.
And the ending was just perfect, and really fitted what had gone before. You'll see when you get there yourself.
All that's left is to wonder what the author will have in store for next time and hope it'll be soon. My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

Unfortunately this book wasn't for me and I DNF'd it. Just me as a person not the book, topics in here I'm just no interested in.

A thoughtful and interesting book which looks at the way society’s view of homosexuality changed during the twentieth century. This is the story of Annie over three timeframes and storylines, from her time as a nurse in a mental health institution in the 1950s, when homosexuality was still illegal, as a single mother in the 1980s, offering men suffering from AIDS support and a roof over their heads through to the current day.

With thanks to the author, the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review an advance copy.

"Hold Back the Night" is an unflinching novel with an equally unflinching protagonist in the form of Annie. The readers is taken through three timelines, almost three different lives that Annie goes through within one lifetime.
Annie's a peculiar protagonist to read about, she is efficient as a nurse, as a mother and wife, but a lot of the times she comes accross as lacking empathy and compassion for the people around her.
The first timeline is set in 1959, it is just a few years after the war and Annie's joining the ranks as a psychiatric nurse together with Rita. The two quickly realise they must set their own feelings and thoughts aside to get by.
We meet Annie again in 1983, when Annie is reeling from the loss of her husband. She starts taking in queer men dying of AIDS in a time where that was not common, and so she fills the house with people to take care of once more.
Her present timeline is during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Annie reminisces about those years and experiences.

While Annie's a straight woman, her lifetimes are defined by queer men, their shame and their own damaged existences in those times. One of the strength of this book, especially as a queer reader and from a queer perspective, is exactly Annie's role as an outsider to the community. She is someone who develops her own relation to queerness, adjacent to that of a community member, and allows herself to live alongside people that others shamed away.

I love it when a character's story is told over their life. We get to see them as young, middle aged, and older, see them as a partner, a spouse, a parent, a widow. It is such a fascinating character device.

The scenes set in 2020 are in first person as Annie, with the other two sections in third person. This gives us both and insider and outsider look at the goings on. The scenes in the 50s and 80s are not just Annie's scenes. And I think that's why it's in the third person; whereas the 2020 scenes are about Annie, and that's why it is in first. It could have been complicated and a bit flitty, difficult to get your head round, but it really works.

I generally don't like stories set during the pandemic, because I feel we lived it, I don't want to relive it, I come to books for escapism. But I didn't mind it too much in this because it's balanced out by the other two sections, and the pandemic itself didn't really play a huge part in the book, so it was okay.

I know it was a different time then, and that hindsight is a marvellous thing, but to read, even in a fiction book, about the AIDS crisis and how these innocent young men were treated so abhorrently, it's so sad but also frustrating. But not only that, just how people were treated in general, especially those with mental health difficulties. It's hard to read, but important to remember.

It's and interesting look at Annie's life, and how she develops. In the 50s, I felt she was quite...to the book. Doing what she had to do in the way she was meant to, following the rules, but questioning them, at least in her head. And then in the 80s, I felt she was initially a bit cold. There was compassion but it felt more like it was her obligation to help, rather than anything else, but she does warm up. And then in the 2020s, you can finally see that heart of hers and how her past has impacted her today.

There are many characters, the main one obviously being Annie, but then we also have Rita who is a second main character, at least in the 1950s scenes. But this is Annie's story from the very start to the very end, and she's a strong presence, and I loved exploring her story from young to old, and how those she met in the past are still affecting her present.

It is such a sensitive book, without being patronising or too aww-bless. It's tender, but doesn't hide away from the raw honesty of the time. There are difficult topics: AIDS, homophobia, mental illness, COVID, death, grief, torture, conversion therapy.

It's not the easiest book to read, which isn't surprising really, given the topics, and yet I felt compelled to be absorbed in it, like I owed it to these fictional characters and the real people they represented. It's not easy to read, but it is important to read.

It's not a very long book, but that's not to say you feel short-changed. It fees like it's long, not in a negative way, but in the sense that it is so packed with emotion that I feel it can't possibly have been a short book. It doesn't drag, nor is it too fast. It's pitched perfectly. If it was any shorter, then you wouldn't have been as invested in the characters, but any longer and it would stretch too much and filled with...well, filler.

For me, it is an exploration of love. Of love for family and friends, colleagues, strangers. Of hetero and homosexual love. Of love amongst hatred. Of love amongst anger. Of love against obstacles. Of nostalgic love, reflective love, "wrong" love.

I really wanted to like this novel, the setting and characters held so much promise, but unfortunately, it didn't quite deliver for me.

Somehow, Hold Back the Night managed to present emotive events and experiences in such a way as to be completely devoid of emotion. As a queer person who works in mental health, both the horrendous treatment of gay people in psychiatric institutions and the impact of the AIDS epidemic, are incredibly close to my heart, and yet, reading about both elicited no emotion from me (and I'm someone who frequently cries at books).

I never fully got a sense of who the protagonist, Annie, was; what she felt about anything or anyone, what was going on for her beyond the roles she played for others. She came across to me as passive and almost as a bystander in her own story, so it was hard to feel invested in her as a character.

With more character development and an injection of emotion, I feel Hold Back the Night could be so much more engaging.

I worked as a psychiatric nurse for many years, so Hold Back The Night book description immediately piqued my interest. Jessica Moor takes an unflinching look at nursing during the 1950s through the eyes of student nurse Annie. From the barbaric treatments used to treat mental health problems to the stigma and awful treatment of AIDS patients, it’s hard-hitting, shocking and emotive.

As I mentioned, the story follows Annie’s nursing journey, which begins in the 1950s where she’s a nurse in Fairlie Hall, a mental hospital. It moves on to the 1980s where she provides a home for men who are dying from AIDS. The story begins in 2020 at the height of COVID and moves back and forth across the three timelines. We learn how Annie struggles with past choices, regret and guilt.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Annie’s as a junior nurse. I would describe her as ‘efficient’, a stickler for following procedure but lacking compassion and empathy. Moving to the 1980s, it felt like she was looking for redemption by taking in lodgers to ease her own guilt. Her relationships with best friend Rita, Lizzie, her daughter and her lodgers seemed to lack warmth. Although in Annie’s defence, this may have stemmed from her years working in Fairlie Hall.

Jessica draw’s parallels between COVID and AIDS through the changing timelines which I thought were very well done. Although very different illnesses, they both caused similar reactions of panic, isolation and ignorance. I found these scenes the most upsetting, knowing full well that this was unfortunately the ‘norm’ back then!

Fantastic novel. The three timelines just tell the story perfectly and I enjoyed this so much.

Will be recommending to all my friends

Brutal and emotional with fast moving and devastating moments this is an excellent read by the author of Bright Young Woman.

This was such a great book - I loved how the 3 different timelines worked and revealed parts of the plot as we went along. A very emotional and hard-hitting book and I thought the morality lens we viewed the story through worked really well.

Absolutely brilliant, loved it. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me an advance copy, I will definitely be recommending.

Made up in three parts and time lapsed throughout the book, it is at once charming, thoughtful and enlightening. A story that is carefully considered and educational through its telling of one woman's journey. Very good thank you netgalley for arc.

I don’t think I have quite the right words to describe this book. It follows Annie’s life, starting in the 1950s where she’s a nurse in an institution, to the 1980s where she provides lodging for men who are dying from AIDS, to the height of the pandemic in 2020. Over the years, the reader follows her as she struggles with her choices, regret and guilt.

Moor built up such vivid characters with heartbreaking stories and endings. I found myself unable to stop thinking about Annie and the lives she changed, for better and for worse. There was something to haunting about the way Moor paired the different timelines and the key events in each one. This book was nothing short of remarkable, overflowing with emotion and heartache. Truly a book I’ll remember for a long, long time, that tells a story that desperately needs to be told.

This book is brutal at times.
The conversion therapy and aids crisis are forefront of the story, with covid in the back ground.
Annie is the star of it all, from young trainee nurse thrown in at the deep end, to independent old lady, I couldn't help but like her, and forgive any mistakes.
At times you could cry for some of these characters.
Packs an emotional punch.