Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Catapult: Must Listens
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale!
Shop the sale
Send as gift
Add to Wish List
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop the sale
In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowNeon in Daylight
Narrator
Saskia Maarleveld
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn more
Length
8 hours
Language
English
New York City in 2012, the sweltering summer before Hurricane Sandy hits. Kate, a young woman newly arrived from England, is staying in a Manhattan apartment while she tries to figure out her future. She has two unfortunate responsibilities during her time in America: to make regular Skype calls to her miserable boyfriend back home, and to cat-sit an indifferent feline named Joni Mitchell.
The city has other plans for her. In New York’s parks and bodegas, its galleries and performance spaces, its bars and clubs crowded with bodies, Kate encounters two strangers who will transform her stay: Bill, a charismatic but embittered writer made famous by the movie version of his only novel; and Inez, his daughter, a recent high school graduate who supplements her Bushwick cafe salary by enacting the fantasies of men she meets on Craigslist. Unmoored from her old life, Kate becomes infatuated with both of them.
Set during a heatwave that feels like it will never break, Neon in Daylight marries deep intelligence with captivating characters to offer us a joyful, unflinching exploration of desire, solitude, and the thin line between life and art.
Hermione Hoby grew up in south London and has lived in New York since 2010. She is a freelance journalist who writes about culture and gender for publications including the New Yorker, the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Times Literary Supplement. She also writes the “Stranger of the Week” column for the Awl. Neon in Daylight is her first novel.
Saskia Maarleveld is an experienced voice-over actress and Earphones Award–winning narrator. Raised in New Zealand and France, she is highly skilled with accents and dialects, and many of her books have been narrated entirely in accents other than her own. In addition to audiobooks, her voice can be heard in animation, video games, and commercials.
Reviews
“A classic New York City novel―sleek and stylish, both in literary craft and in the milieu portrayed.”
“Hoby avoids getting eaten alive by the city that never sleeps in Neon in Daylight."
“In Hoby’s radiant first novel…her sentences are sleek and tailored. Language molds snugly to thought.”
"[In Hoby’s] smart, stylish debut novel…that rush of discovery and possibility—being young in New York—is entwined with displacement, disconnection, and self-deception. And a bruising loneliness is not only a potential side effect but a necessary part of the experience, too.”
“You’ll adore the bustling, artsy version of NYC in this read.”
“A sharp novel with perceptive observations…and vivid, complicated relationships.”
“In language so vivid that readers could break a sweat in an igloo, debut novelist Hoby brings to life the seamy underworld of bright, bored people during a suffocating New York City summer, demonstrating the sure hand seen in works by Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz.”
“With effortlessly fluid prose, Hoby, herself a New York transplant from London, excels most promisingly in depicting the vivid, perhaps most iconic American city.”
“Hoby is a master of atmosphere…[especially of] the vibrant loneliness.”
Expand reviews