Dan Richards is a great man for acknowledgements – there are no fewer than twelve pages of them in Overnight. But unlike the reams of acknowledgements found in some works of fiction, they are entirely appropriate here. Richards has interviewed a large number of people for this book, which is part-rooted in a BBC Radio 4 documentary series. It is a very different book from Al Alvarez’s classic Night, which at the outset it resembles. Richards acknowledges the influence of Night fulsomely and hopes Alvarez would ‘have been pleased’ with Overnight. But where Alvarez’s book was more psychological, Gothic and dream-orientated, this is a profoundly civic work, far from nocturnal romanticism, and for the most part a celebration of the unsung heroism of people who work through the hours of darkness. 

In one story, a man with Down’s syndrome – middle-aged, four foot eleven, wearing pyjamas – has gone missing. At twenty-two minutes past midnight, a helicopter with a crew of four takes off to search for him. With dementia, the medic on board tells Richards, people tend to go in straight lines and stop when they meet an obstacle, ‘but with Down’s, he could have gone anywhere’. Elsewhere, we meet people nursing, driving mail trains, enduring the ‘forever night’ of nuclear submarines and dealing with containerised cargo at Southampton docks. Richards admires the docks, in his characteristically upbeat manner: ‘the pride and commitment, the joy and good humour I encountered during the nights I spent in Southampton was wonderful.’ Richards’s stint in the docks also throws up the unexpected revelation that containers have to be loaded differently in Liverpool, because it is ‘a hotspot for theft’.

Richards’s desire to spend a night studying the workings of a hospital took a personal turn when he almost died of Covid back in 2021. Admitted to hospital, he found himself shunned and resented by other, non-Covid patients (so much so that after they started causing trouble the nurses curtailed