From the acclaimed author of The Journey Home, a new novel of tremendous power and beauty about a man’s hidden past and about the immutability of love and loss. For twenty years Christian Benediktsson has led a quiet life as William Randolph Hearst’s butler. His days are filled with the rituals of Hearst’s life and the demands of running a grand house. But in his most private thoughts and memories, he relives another life: his abandonment of his wife and children in Iceland for an actress in New York, a reckless affair and a tragic death, financial downfall, and the profound retreat from life that led him to Hearst’s San Simeon. No one else knows the secret of the man he once was—husband, father, businessman, lover—and, ultimately, even he will choose to forget that this person ever existed. Walking into the Night is a stunning portrait of a man wrestling with guilt and secret passions. Olaf Olafsson surpasses anything he has accomplished thus far in this wise and beautiful novel.