In-Store: Natalka Burian presents The Night Shift

Event guidelines:

• All guests must be vaccinated to attend, and must provide proof of vaccination in order to enter event.
• All attendees must wear a face mask at all times.
• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be broadcast on YouTube:
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

Sweetbitter meets The Midnight Library in this plot-driven novel about a young bartender when she’s introduced to shortcuts – a passage that bends time and space – forcing her to finally confront her family loss and trauma that's overshadowed her life.

In New York City, you can be alone while surrounded by millions of people. That suits Jean just fine as she still struggles to connect with others after the loss of her parents in a deadly car accident that she alone survived. Without any safety net, she’s trying to make ends meet, working at bars and a high-end bakery at night, but the hustle between jobs is leaving her exhausted. That’s when a new work friend, Iggy, introduces her to “shortcuts,” mysterious doorways found in back rooms, which allow her to jump through time and space to different locations. These shortcuts exist all over the city and create a drug-like high when you go through. The rules are you can only go through them one way and only at night.

When Iggy goes missing, deep down Jean knows it’s related to the shortcuts and his growing obsession with them. As Jean and Iggy’s other mutual friends start to piece together the shortcuts’ origin, Jean realizes she’s much more closely connected to the shortcuts than she could have imagined – her mother being one of the original patients to test their therapeutic abilities. As a result, Jean’s body is able to withstand the effects of the shortcuts better than anyone’s, and it will be up to her to use the shortcuts to bring Iggy back.

With a propulsive plot, this story depicts the many people who work the late-night shifts in the city—at restaurants, bars, bakeries—with a unique space/time travel twist that allows Jean to finally processes the loss of her parents and form a new family along the way.

Natalka Burian is the cofounder of the Freya Project, a nonprofit reading series that supports community-based activism and the work of women and nonbinary writers. She is the author of Welcome to the Slipstream, a young adult book, and the cocktail cookbook A Woman’s Drink, and is the co-owner of two bars, Elsa and Ramona.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Books Are Magic, 225 Smith Street, Brooklyn, United States