The Older Night

or twenty years, Ilmari has been paid to watch strangers sleep - six screens, six wired bodies, a manual with a name for every way of spending a night. He also has a secret that would interest his employer: he sleeps twice a night, and always has. Down with the early dark, awake at three, one quiet hour of coffee and unsent letters, then down again until morning. In his profession this is not a habit. It is a finding. And findings come with paperwork. Then the clinic is bought by Unira, a sleep-tech company that sells titanium rings, sleep scores, and the belief that the night is "the last unoptimized frontier of human performance." When an 84-year-old lighthouse keeper arrives - denounced by a ring his daughter gave him for Christmas, his two-watch sleep intact after sixty years, refusing to be cured - Ilmari must decide what he is: a technician of the corrected night, or the last man on watch. Set across one Helsinki winter, from the solstice to the equinox, The Older Night is a dry, tender, quietly furious novel about the hour the light bulb abolished, the industry that bills us for our inheritance, and the difference - older than the lamp - between being watched over and being recorded. They have not failed. They have been graded.