ROBERT CROOKE RETURNS TO THE MORRIS FAMILY IN ACROSS THE ENDLESS NIGHT, A MOVING NOVEL OF MEMORY, GRIEF, AND WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND

The sequel to Eric Hoffer Book Award finalist Letting the House Go releases August 4, 2026, from Unsolicited Press

PORTLAND, Ore. — Unsolicited Press will release Across the Endless Night, the highly anticipated new novel by journalist and author Robert Crooke, on August 4, 2026. A compassionate and deeply human meditation on family, mortality, memory, and uncertain identities, the novel returns to Richard Morris six years after the events of Crooke’s acclaimed Letting the House Go.

It is 2021, and Richard is living at the far end of a long, complicated life. Six years have passed since the death of his ex-wife Irene, yet her final counsel continues to guide him. Aging and increasingly aware of his own fragility, Richard has devoted himself to the tangled, multigenerational family they created together.

Surrounded by children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews, Richard finds himself astonished by their unguarded love and generosity of spirit. Their lives pull him into family crises, uncertain futures, buried histories, and the daily intimacy of people trying to care for one another imperfectly. As his health wanes and the country around them grows increasingly divided, Richard is forced to confront memory, loss, and the limits of the time still available to him.

Readers of Letting the House Go will recognize Richard’s fierce and sometimes self-centered intensity, now tempered by hard-won humility. Yet Across the Endless Night stands firmly on its own, inviting new readers into a vivid Long Island world populated by a rich cast of characters confronting the enduring question of what, and who, remains when a life begins to narrow.

“Through this charming, perfectly balanced, and elegant novel, runs the thread of Richard’s grief over the loss of his ex-wife six years earlier and a sister decades before that,” writes Anne Leigh Parrish, author of The Hedgerow. “Across the Endless Night is a lovely, nuanced exploration of acceptance, grief, regret, and reconciliation.”

Eileen Charbonneau, author of Seven Aprils, calls the book “that rare thing, a literary novel that moves,” praising Crooke’s dynamic narrative, multigenerational cast, vivid North Fork setting, and ability to make the reader feel “dropped into a life, not a novel.”

Crooke brings the eye of a journalist and the emotional patience of a literary novelist to Richard’s reckoning. The result is a story poised between humor and sorrow, where health scares exist beside a two-year-old’s sorting game, family secrets surface alongside conversations about art and commerce, and grief coexists with the ordinary pleasures of being useful to the people one loves.

Robert Crooke is a journalist, media executive, and author. His poetry has appeared in West Hills Review: A Walt Whitman Journal, and his short fiction has been published by The Paragon Journal, Literary Orphans Journal, and Linden Avenue Literary Journal. He has contributed book reviews and literary essays to Heavy Feather Review and Exacting Clam. Crooke began his career as a sports reporter and columnist for the Newhouse-owned Long Island Daily Press and later spent thirteen years as North American press spokesman for Reuters. His novel Letting the House Go, published by Unsolicited Press in 2022, was a 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award Category Finalist. He lives with his wife in Bridgewater, Connecticut.

Across the Endless Night will be published by Unsolicited Press on August 4, 2026.