In the wake of his wife’s death, Nick Nacht finds himself adrift, seeking emotional renewal among strangers in unfamiliar places. As he navigates the challenges of grief, he encounters a tapestry of lives—a troubled teenage girl, a married woman with a hidden agenda, a new neighbor’s pet bird, a young poet grappling with her own demons, and a woman who translates indigenous texts. Over the course of a year, from the sunny shores of Florida to the vibrant Mediterranean, these vivid encounters push him toward a reckoning with his deep feelings of loss and abandonment. With quick, lyrical prose, Skylighting unfolds a surprisingly intricate story, weaving together moments of connection and solitude. As Nick navigates the complexities of grief, he learns that healing can emerge from the most unexpected places, illuminating a path toward renewal and hope amid the shadows of sorrow.

Praise for Skylighting

“The quiet but haunting details in Charles Hansmann’s Skylighting create a puzzle that, when put together as a reader moves through the book, reveals a portrait of grief and disconnection that sheds light on life’s most important questions: what meaning can we find in our lives, in the sometimes-gentle and sometimes-cruel relationships we pursue with each other? Meaning, in this book, comes through in a gauzy, filtered way, delivered through beautiful language that rewards the reader again and again. There is as much importance in what’s between the lines as there is pleasure to be had in the story at hand. This book left me reeling, wanting to go back and read it all immediately again!”

—Kelly Magee, author of The Neighborhood and A Guide to Strange Places

“Skylighting dramatizes the days and nights of a grief-stricken man who abandons all meaning. Without pressure to comprehend the significance of other people’s words or platitudes, he experiences a strangely alluring purity. Each scene portrays raw engagement—what it must be like to drift along with no concern for revelation or purpose. Every interaction becomes a plunge into stimulus. The result is not meaninglessness but alertness. Work, travel, attraction, tenderness, and all quotidian affairs become weirdly beautiful. From the first page onward, Hansmann’s narrator leaves deep wells of subtext. He doesn’t insist that we believe or disbelieve but allows readers to fall headlong into each moment’s energy. In this way, Skylighting is both artistic and gratifying. It should be widely read and loudly admired.”

—John Mauk, author of Where All Things Flatten and Field Notes for the Earthbound

“Hansmann’s Skylighting is a dreamy sphere of a novel written in lovely lucid prose.”

—Mesha Maren, author of Shae and Perpetual West