In this story we follow a man as he travels the world with a friend who is dying of AIDS. Both men have lost many of their friends and former partners, and their friend groups and broader community are still reeling from these staggering losses. So when Yuri knows he does not have much time left he sells his life insurance to a company poised to take advantage of men like him, and uses the money to travel the world, one last grand adventure before he's gone. At first he is feeling mostly ok, and the traveling is fun, but after a while he starts to develop more medical issues and it gets harder, both because of his health and because of the ways people around them react to his illness.
This is a great book for depicting what it would be like to live in this setting, as a homosexual man dealing with AIDS not as a news item, but as a scary reality that is killing all your friends. It also does a great job of showing how fear of AIDS added to existing homophobia to make life harder for gay men. But, the world tour plot felt ruched in such a short book. Fewer stops and more pages per location might have made the story feel less rushed and allow for more space to process the ideas the story seems to want to evoke.

The novel’s premise sounded incredibly unique, but I found that the overall storyline didn’t resonate with me. I usually enjoy novels that span decades, but this one felt somewhat disjointed. I never had enough time to fully understand each character before the book moved on to another of its four-part sections.

While the writing is undoubtedly beautiful, I was hoping for a more gripping story with memorable characters.

Ellis Scott's debut novel "Night Terminus" tackles weighty and important subject matter with evident passion and literary ambition. Beginning with that fateful one-night stand in Paris in 1985, Scott chronicles four decades of queer experience against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, creating a sweeping narrative that spans continents and generations.

The book's greatest strength lies in its lyrical prose and Scott's ability to capture the profound sense of loss and anxiety that defined an entire generation. The unnamed narrator's journey from Montreal to the deserts of Iran feels authentic in its restlessness, and Scott excels at evoking the atmosphere of different places and eras. There are passages of genuine beauty, particularly those dealing with chosen family and the bonds forged in the face of extinction.

However, the novel's ambitious scope sometimes works against it. The four-part structure feels uneven, with some sections significantly stronger than others. While the spiritual and physical journey concept is compelling, the narrative occasionally becomes too diffuse, losing focus as it moves between locations and time periods. The unnamed narrator, while serving the novel's themes of displacement and anonymity, sometimes feels more like a vessel for Scott's ideas than a fully realized character.

The meditation on survival during the AIDS crisis is powerful and necessary, but Scott's handling of grief and memory can be heavy-handed at times. The book works best when it allows emotions to emerge naturally from the story rather than when it explicitly philosophizes about loss and statelessness.

"Night Terminus" is clearly a labor of love and an important addition to queer literature. Scott's voice is distinctive and his commitment to honoring this community's experience is evident throughout. While the execution doesn't always match the ambition, this debut shows real promise and tackles its subject matter with the gravity it deserves.

Recommended for: Readers of literary fiction, those interested in LGBTQ+ literature and AIDS memoir/fiction, fans of travel narratives with emotional depth

Not recommended for: Readers seeking linear plots or those preferring more conventional narrative structures

Ellis Scott's debut novel, ‘Night Terminus’ details the emotional, physical and spiritual journey that the narrator takes as he processes what happened to him and a whole generation of gay and queer men who were wiped out by the AIDS pandemic. Scott's narrator visits cities and people that have a connection to his past and he remembers how he tried to make sense of AIDS in the 1980s.

When your body fails you, you often turn to cherished landmarks or pieces of art to make sense of why your life is chaotic and incomprehensible. Through the character of Yuri, the narrator shows us how we can become part of the landscape as we slip further away from consciousness. Yuri represents all of those men who never achieved their potential as their lives were cut short because of this horrific disease. Scott reminds us how people were treated like criminals because they were HIV positive. In our current time, where hatred against the LGBT community is on the rise, it is disheartening to imagine going back to a time when gay men and their bodies were treated so dismissively and grotesquely.

If there's a criticism of the book, it is that Scott can lean into too many descriptions of the landscape or pieces of art and it can be a tad overwhelming at times. I would have preferred a bit more of the human interactions, but that's just a small quibble because Scott does an excellent job of creating a novel that speaks to a lost generation of men. We lost so many wonderful men to this disease and to society’s indifference and hatred, and if this novel teaches us anything, it's that we cannot go back to that time or those attitudes.

This was a really interesting, emotional read. I enjoyed the author's writing style, and really appreciated the author's ability to make the reader care for the unnamed narrator. I thought the book was really well-written, and I liked the chapter organization style as well! I did find a few parts of the dialogue a bit difficult to follow at times, but otherwise, I enjoyed this book.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for a review.

Gist review: a novel both urgently necessary and beautifully devastating; Reminiscent of WG Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Alan Hollinghurst.

An unnamed narrator born in the mid-1960s recounts a series of meaningful encounters with strangers and reunions with long-time friends. The five encounters span forty years, from 1985 to 2025, from the cruelest days of the AIDS pandemic to the first fourth of the new century, and follows the narrator in his decades-long wanderings from the UK, to France, on to Turkey, Iran, India, and back to France.

Part elegy, part ode, the novel is at once a lament for the loss and a reclaiming of the radical openness born of the queer experience in the latter half of the 20th century.

The novel’s characters and plot center on queer individuals who survived the plagued that assailed and decimated the queer and other marginalized communities. Four decades on, Scott’s novel prompts us to consider what a life lived might mean for those who, for whatever reason, survived until now, into old age.

But Night Terminus also asks us to consider what it meant for those individuals not only to have witnessed their brothers’, sisters’, lovers’, and chosen family members’ suffer, but also what it meant to go on living in a world that had rejected them, cast them out, refused them support, medical care or even funeral rights. What does it mean for one to be expected to go on living in a world where family, church, state, and medical institutions would sooner leave one to agonize in a perpetual state of stigma and abandon than to offer the slightest gesture of kindness.

It is from this this very real experience that Scott’s novel so subtly and beautifully recovers the radical openness to otherness and the potential for community and support that lies in recognizing that shared, lived vulnerability capable of transcending any barriers.

Ellis Scott does a amazing job in writing this book and making me care about the unnamed narrator. It was a strong concept in the genre and appreciated the respect in the age of AIDS. I enjoyed going on this journey and thought worked well overall and am excited for more.