By Nightfall - Softcover

Cunningham, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007307772 ISBN 13: 9780007307777

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2011

Synopsis

From the Pultizer Prize-winning author of new novel ‘The Snow Queen’, comes the story of a marriage thrown off course by a moment of mistaken identity.

Peter Harris is forty-four, prosperous, the owner of a big New York apartment and a player in the contemporary art scene. He has been married to Rebecca for close to twenty years. Their marriage is sound, in the way marriages are. Peter might even describe himself as happy. But then Rebecca’s much younger brother Mizzy shows up for a visit. Beautiful, twenty-three years old, with a history of drug problems, Mizzy is looking for direction. And in his presence, Peter finds himself questioning his marriage, his desires, his career – the entire world he has so carefully constructed for himself.

Making us think deeply about the uses of beauty and the place of love in our lives, By Nightfall is heartbreaking look at the way we live now.

About this title

Review:

‘Cunningham encourages his reader to wrestle with things that interest him by sketching his plots delicately over classic lines. In this case, the arrival of the guest who will change everything is reworked into a discussion about art and decay by a writer who can write a page-turning novel that lingers eloquently in the mind’ The Times

‘This is a book about art, love, marriage and mortality... One of the intriguing and peculiar qualities of ‘By Nightfall’ is that it makes you live with a character who seems never quite at ease with his own identity... One of Cunningham's gifts is to be able to shift gears when he wants, out of banal everydayness into an intense rhapsodic meditation on the meaning and purpose of life.’ Guardian

‘Michael Cunningham is embarked on one of the more satisfying career trajectories of contemporary American novelists...’By Nightfall’ offers the reader an abundance of exquisite, enriching thumbnail sketches’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Constantly surprising ... a love letter to New York, a hymn to youth and a meditation on the way art and literature alter our perception of the world’ Evening Standard

About the Author:

Michael Cunningham is the author of six novels, including ‘A Home at the End of the World’, ‘Flesh and Blood’, ‘The Hours’ (winner of the PEN / Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize), ‘Specimen Days’ and ‘By Nightfall’, as well as ‘Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown’. His most recent novel is ‘The Snow Queen’. He lives in New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0007307772
• ISBN 13: 9780007307777
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256