When We Argued All Night: A Novel

From bestselling and award-winning author Alice Mattison comes a breathtaking new novel following two best friends from Brooklyn, exploring the way in which the world and their lives change over the course of the 20th century. The deft literary touch that readers have grown to love in novels such as Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn and The Book Borrower, as well as story collections such as In Case We’re Separated, combine in a marvelous narrative of friendship and family, with rich, complicated characters who grow and change together over the course of seventy-five years. Fans of generational stories such as East of Eden, or novels of friendship such as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, will be swept away by the intimate beauty of Mattison’s latest triumph, When We Argued All Night.
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Two young men are swimming naked in an Adirondack lake when they hear a motor, a car appears, and two women get out, one with an orange scarf around her head. It's 1936: New York is suffering through the Great Depression, frightening things are happening in Europe, and Artie Saltzman and Harold Abramovitz, friends since their Brooklyn childhood, are unsure about everything—jobs, lefty politics, women. After this time in the mountains, nothing will be quite the same.

From World War II to the McCarthy-era witch hunts, through work, marriages, and life with children, Artie and Harold turn to each other, whether for solace or another good argument. And when Artie's daughter Brenda comes of age during the 1960s, her struggles with jobs, love, and friendship in yet another period of political turmoil recall Artie and Harold's youth.

A sweeping yet intimate novel about people who never stop loving one another despite everything life throws at them, When We Argued All Night illuminates a friendship over more than sixty-five years, as the twentieth century gives way to the changed yet recognizable times in which we live.

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“This excellent novel weaves the story of a 1921 trolley strike. . . . Mattison is concerned with the small decisions and coincidences that alter the course of our lives. Are they accidents, or impulses born of something deeper? Mattison’s observations are so minutely compelling that each one feels like a shiny object, once lost but found unexpectedly.” - The New Yorker

“[A] quirky, original novel. Mattison’s voice is intelligent, spare and without pretense.” - Washington Post Book World

“A delightfully suspenseful domestic drama. . . . Mattison’s novel summons the same exhilarating feeling as sitting on a stoop on a sultry New York City evening, enraptured by a neighbor’s gripping tale.” - New York Post

“A jewel of a collection . . . masterful. . . . You’ll want to read the stories again to find the repeated objects, and to solidify the characters’ relationships in your mind—and you’ll find the stories are every bit as rich and satisfying the second time around.” - Deborah Tannen, Washington Post

“WHEN WE ARGUED ALL NIGHT provides a surprisingly intimate look at a lifelong friendship.” - Shelf Awareness

“In deceptively quiet, guileless prose, she has described the mind numbing routine of child-care and the fraught, complex relations of men and women. Only Margaret Atwood (in Cat’s Eye) has written as knowingly about the frienship between women. Emotionally wrenching, beautifully realized work.” - The New York Times

“Mattison always operates in both close-up and wide angle, and here the effect is often dazzling. Her prose is so crisp that along with all the pleasures of fiction she manages to deliver the particular intellectual satisfactions of an essay or a documentary.” - New York Times Book Review