The Night of Many Endings

Nora Martinez is the librarian in Silver Ridge, Colorado, relentlessly cheerful and quietly wrecked: her parents died in a crash that left her brother Mario injured, and years of addiction and homelessness have since put him beyond her reach. She has never stopped looking for him.

On the night a blizzard closes the town, the library holds Nora and four others — Marlene, an elderly woman convinced there is little good left in the world; Jasmine, a teenager in trouble; Lewis, a homeless man with one wish left; and Vlado, the security guard who loves books and, from a distance, Nora. Snowed in, with the power failing and the night stretching, the assumptions they have made about each other stop holding.

Melissa Payne writes a warm, sad, character-driven novel about homelessness, addiction, and the unglamorous ways people rescue one another.