Paperback of the week: Overnight by Dan Richards

Between 2020 and 2023, Dan Richards spent a lot of time staying up through the night with people who do it as a matter of course: dockers, bakers, nurses and outreach workers. In telling their stories, Overnight reveals the activities that take place while most of us sleep, and recasts the small hours that Dickens, an episodic insomniac, called “the real desert region of the night”.

Richards is good company and gifted at helping the reader see the spaces he visits, no matter how uncommon. Super-cranes unloading freight trains at the Southampton docks, “passing back and forth over the wagons below like enormous inkjet printers”. The “black marble mountains of the sea, crazed with foam”, illuminated by the floodlights on the night ferry to Shetland, ploughing through a force nine gale. Or, more humbly but with no less sharpness, the dough-mixers in a bakery being “akin to Star Wars droids”.

I was fascinated by the chapter that line comes from, in which Richards visits Dalston bakery the Dusty Knuckle. Partly because it’s my local, partly because I love baked goods, and partly because after leaving school I worked night shifts at a bread factory (albeit I was dealing with pallets of the plastic-bagged supermarket stuff, not the Dusty Knuckle’s chewy pillows of potato sourdough). The same chapter also features one of my favourite lines in the book. Describing how physical the work is, and how strong it makes you, the bakery’s co-owner adds that “you develop a really weird physique: muscly on top but with a little pot belly because all you eat is butter”.

Such moments foreground Richards’s aptitude for uncovering these worlds and showing them to us. He has an ability, presumably through the interest he displays, to get the people he encounters to open up about their work, and sometimes about much more than that. You don’t feel like you’re reading an interview – rather you’re being afforded the privilege of sitting in on a conversation.

One of these takes place between Richards, a nurse and a consultant, part of his healthcare team when he was hospitalised with Covid in the summer of 2021. “You were dying,” a doctor tells him after the crisis has passed. “We caught you just in time.” Richards’s anxiety about this experience persists throughout the book. Listless accounts of lockdown currently abound in fiction, but this, an urgent patient’s-eye view, feels like a more valuable contribution to pandemic literature. The episode in which he, no longer contagious, is moved to a new ward and his neighbours, having discovered what’s wrong with him, angrily demand his removal, is memorably awful.

Sometimes – in the chapter about a search-and-rescue helicopter team, for example – there is a surfeit of technical information that threatens to swamp the human story. To be fair to Richards, though, he’s a good judge of what belongs in the main text of the book and what to consign to its many footnotes. My problem is that I’m incapable of leaving a footnote unread. But this welter of information is the result of the curiosity Richards has for the lives of others and their occupations, which is the very trait that makes Overnight so interesting.

Richards isn’t just a recorder; he’s also a seeker. The current that pushes along beneath the surface of Overnight is the idea of community engendered by this network of nocturnal labour that stretches across the country, as well as its surrounding seas. Writing about the Shipping Forecast, “a kind of meteorological found poetry”, Richards enthuses about “radio’s magic”: “Listening, you’re not alone. Something that connects and comforts, even in the darkest hours. What a wonderful, humane service that is.” He notes that some nights “are hard, some times are dark, but night itself is a neutral realm where most anything can happen”.

Throughout this guide to that realm, he finds that where there’s darkness there’s often light.

Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark by Dan Richards is published by Canongate (£10.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £9.89. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Lacey/Getty Images