A four-time Academy Award nominee, twice for writing and twice for acting, ETHAN HAWKE has starred in the films Dead Poets Society, Reality Bites, Gattaca and Training Day, as well as Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise trilogy and Boyhood. He is the author of Rules for a Knight, The Hottest State, Ash Wednesday and A Bright Ray of Darkness. He lives in Brooklyn with his four children and his wife.
Ethan Hawke is a true writer and his duality as an artist is
skilfully reflected in A Bright Ray of Darkness. Hawke circles,
descends, and crawls into his characters' skin. Grimy shadows pass
over the footlights, into the bowels of the theatre, where a
struggling actor, perhaps mirroring the writer, seeks the vine of
redemption, and claws his way into becoming. Bright Ray is a
riveting work.
*Patti Smith*
William is the star of this vivid drama from Ethan Hawke ... this
is ultimately a book about the transcendent value of great art ...
it communicates a real power.
*Sunday Times*
Film star William Harding is fed up with having his personal life
examined in public. The protagonist of this novel, the first in
five years from Hawke (best known for his acting role in Richard
Linklater's Before trilogy), is also disgusted at the ways in which
he has allowed his marriage to collapse around him. His debut
Broadway role offers him a chance at redemption and turns this
bracing book into a considered meditation on the evil of celebrity
and the demanding yet restorative power of theatre.
*New Statesman*
Ethan Hawke, whose acting career has combined celebrity wattage
with indie integrity, brings hard-won experience to his latest
literary endeavour ... [A] wild ride of a book ... Written with
real fire & originality. Not many novels combine scenes of lying
semi-conscious by a motel toilet with thoughts on the perfection of
the iambic pentameter.
*Metro*
An emotional ode to theatre as medicine for heartbreak, and an
interesting meditation on fame.
*Radio Times*
Ethan Hawke has got a lot of nerve. But he's also got a lot of
talent ... What's most irritating about A Bright Ray of Darkness is
that it's really good ... A novel that explores the demands of
acting and the delusions of manhood with tremendous verve and
insight ... Hawke is a genius at conjuring the hush of the
auditorium, the thrill of live actors, the magical sense of a
performance moving through time. Amid the endless pandemic
lockdown, reading this novel with its spirited scene-by-scene
re-enactments is the closest I've gotten to live theatre in 10
months ... I want to be immune to Hawke's charms, but I admit it:
He's written a witty, wise and heartfelt novel about a spoiled
young man growing up and becoming, haltingly, a better person. A
Bright Ray of Darkness is a deeply hopeful story about the
possibility of rising above one's narcissism. Bravo.
*Ron Charles, Washington Post*
Hawke blurs the boundaries between past roles and autobiography and
brings a world of fame, longing and oblivion into sharp focus.
*BuzzMag*
William Harding is a successful film star whose life is in turmoil.
Outed by the press as an adulterer, he is now holed up in a New
York hotel, divorcing his popstar wife while preparing to make his
Broadway debut in Henry IV. In his first novel for 20 years, Hawke
has obeyed the adage 'write what you know', bringing the theatrical
world, from first rehearsal to final performance, thrillingly to
life.
*Mail on Sunday*
...a fine book, full of narrative drive, illuminating information
about the power of the stage, and a storyline that goes at quite a
pace, but still has much room for humanity, showing that however
big the mistakes people make, and however many people know about
those mistakes, there is still the chance of redemption, if you
look for it.
*NB*
This enjoyable literary outing is in the American tradition of
writers like Saul Bellow ... The Bellow vibe comes with Harding's
active wrestling with his own conscience and it is never a sterile
or bloodless reflection as he's a charged-up, sex-driven,
cocaine-fuelled, whiskey drinking bloke with chips on his shoulder
... it is Harding's failures as a person that make him real for the
reader ... a highly engaging and enjoyable read ... lively and
spirited ... As we get on with lockdown after lockdown and a world
without plays, gigs, and the community of shared experience this is
a novel reminding us to cherish what we are missing.
*Irish Examiner*
A rather easier read is Ethan Hawke's A Bright Ray of Darkness: a
smart novel about Broadway, acting, marriage, love and fame.
*David Mitchell*
Delightfully, Hawke goes full throttle, conjuring a world of
thespian grandiosity, engorged egos, brittle self-doubt and callow
celebrity with a bravura performance.
*Financial Times*
A thumpingly accomplished novel about art, the heart, the Way of
the Actor and scandal in the social media age. Whip smart and
dripping with one-liners, A BRIGHT RAY OF DARKNESS is an urbane,
uplifting blast of a write-what-you-know novel.
*David Mitchell*
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