Loyalty and Friendly City Books are delighted to welcome Natalka Burian, Chantal V. Johnson, and Liv Stratman for a festive virtual celebration of The Night Shift! This event will be held digitally via Crowdcast. Click here to register for the event, or you can order the book on our website to be automatically added to the event's registration list. There will also be an option to snag the book during the event.

During the event, Natalka will lead us in a special cocktail making class! If you'd like to follow along at home, the ingredient list and recipe are available on our website. 

Only by traveling into the past can Jean discover a happy future...

Hidden behind back doors of bars and restaurants and theaters and shops all over New York City are shortcuts--secret passageways that allow you to jump through time and space to emerge in different parts of the city. No one knows where they came from, but there are rules--you can only travel through them one way and only at night.

When Jean's work friend Iggy introduces her to the shortcuts, it's to help shorten her commute between her night shifts bartending and her work at an upscale bakery. Jean is intrigued but has a hard time shaking the side effects--the shortcuts make her more talkative, more open to discussing her past and recalling memories she's tried hard to forget.

When Iggy goes missing, Jean believes it's related to the shortcuts and his growing obsession with them. But as she starts digging into their origins, she comes to find a strange connection between herself and the shortcuts. A shimmering, propulsive novel set in New York City during the early aughts and across time, The Night Shift shows that by confronting the past can we reshape our future.

Natalka Burian is the co-owner of two bars, Elsa and Ramona, as well as the co-founder of The Freya Project, a non-profit reading series that supports community-based activism and annually awards five unrestricted grants to further the work of women and non-binary writers. She received an MA from Columbia University where she studied Eastern European literature. Natalka is the author of the young adult novel, Welcome to the Slipstream, the cocktail cookbook, A Woman’s Drink, and two novels, Daughters of the Wild and The Night Shift. Natalka, her bars and books have been featured in The New Yorker, Elle, Vogue, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She grew up on a farm, but now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.

Chantal V. Johnson is a tenant lawyer and writer. A graduate of Stanford Law School and a 2018 Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow, she lives in New York.

Liv Stratman earned an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her writing has appeared in the Boston Review, Witness, and the Cincinnati Review. She worked for many years in a bakery and as a bookseller, and Cheat Day is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn.

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during this virtual event.

Natalka Burian, Chantal V. Johnson, and Liv Stratman for THE NIGHT SHIFT