By Nightfall: A Novel

Michael Cunningham

Sep 2010 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

Peter and Rebecca Harris: mid-forties denizens of Manhattan's SoHo, nearing the apogee of committed careers in the arts—he a dealer, she an editor. With a spacious loft, a college-age daughter in Boston, and lively friends, they are admirable, enviable contemporary urbanites with every reason, it seems, to be happy. Then Rebecca's much younger look-alike brother, Ethan (known in thefamily as Mizzy, "the mistake"), shows up for a visit. A beautiful, beguiling twenty-three-year-old with a history of drug problems, Mizzy is wayward, at loose ends, looking for direction. And in his presence, Peter finds himself questioning his artists, their work, his career—the entire world he has so carefully constructed.

Like his legendary, Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Hours, Michael Cunningham's masterly new novel is a heartbreaking look at the way we live now. Full of shocks and aftershocks, it makes us think and feel deeply about the uses and meaning of beauty and the place of love in our lives.

Ratings and reviews

Cunningham is such a fluid, beautiful writer that even though this book is practically a love song to New York City, set in a milieu (the contemporary art world) so foreign to me that I could relate to about one detail in three, I was perfectly happy to follow the protagonist through his faintly-tortured, overprivileged existence and felt entirely satisfied at the end. Gorgeous, sly literary references buried here and there in the text made me feel like a genius each time I noticed one: "Bette, a serious person, would wave only if she were drowning;" "Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity."

About the author

Michael Cunningham was raised in Los Angeles and lives in New York City. He is the author of the novels The Hours, A Home at the End of the World, Specimen Days, and Flesh and Blood. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories, and he is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Hours, which was a New York Times bestseller, and was chosen as a Best Book of 1998 by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Publishers Weekly. He is a Professor at Brooklyn College for the M.F.A program.