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The Meaning of Night is the debut novel by author Michael Cox.Cox's book is a 600-page crime thriller novel set in Victorian England.It was one of four books picked for the shortlist for the Costa Book Awards prize for the debut novel of 2006, [1] losing out to Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves, which went on to win the overall award for best novel of 2006.
Like Robbins' other books, the plot involves an eclectic mix of characters and complicated scenarios, and mixes the mundane with the mysterious, in the form of the Sirius mysteries and the mythology surrounding the Dogon Tribe. [1]
The book is written in the style of a reporter on the news who is reporting on the number of sleepers in the world. The book starts with a "very small bug" named Van Vleck yawning. The narrator then tells the reader that this is very important news and goes on to explain that a yawn is contagious and will cause sleep across the countryside.
There the story is associated with the Indian idiom 'the sound the hare heard', meaning an impossibility. A much later Western equivalent is the folk tale of Henny Penny, where the associated idiom is 'the sky is falling'. In the Aesopic fable of "The Hares and the Frogs" the stampede is more limited.
The yawn reflex has long been observed to be contagious. In 1508, Erasmus wrote, "One man's yawning makes another yawn", [39] and the French proverbialized the idea to "Un bon bâilleur en fait bâiller sept" ('One good gaper makes seven others gape'). [40] Often, if one person yawns, this may cause another person to "empathetically" yawn. [23]
Studies have shown that one move frequently made by pups may actually be a sign of empathy.
At dawn, the frogs return to the pond and their normal life of resting on lily pads and swimming. Back in the city, people investigate traces left by the frogs. The final pages of the book show "next Tuesday" around eight in the evening, with pigs hovering above the roof of a farm building.
He later returns to fetch Sarny and take her to "pit school" in the night, where she sees and learns what a catalog is, learns the rest of the letters, and has acquired great knowledge- something no one can take away from her. Since John comes at night, he is called Nightjohn. This book was followed by a sequel called Sarny, a Life Remembered ...