By Nightfall: A Novel

Michael Cunningham

Sep 2010 · Macmillan + ORM

About this ebook

A New York Times bestseller by a Pulitzer Prize winner: A well-off middle-aged Manhattanite's life is upended by a visit from his struggling brother-in-law.

"Cunningham's observations of our desperate search for the real fill and break the heart." ―Ellen Kanner, Miami Herald

Peter and Rebecca Harris, midforties, are prosperous denizens of Manhattan. He's an art dealer, she's an editor. They live well. They have their troubles―their ebbing passions, their wayward daughter, and certain doubts about their careers―but they feel as though they're happy. Happy enough. Until Rebecca's much younger, look-alike brother, Ethan (known in the family as Mizzy, short for the Mistake), comes to visit. And after he arrives, nothing will ever be the same again.

This poetic and compelling masterpiece is a heartbreaking look at a marriage and the way we now live. Full of shocks and aftershocks, By Nightfall is a novel about the uses and meaning of beauty, and the place of love in our lives.

"Cunningham makes you turn the pages. . . . [He] writes so well, and with such an economy of language, that he can call up the poet's exact match."―Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times Book Review

"Cunningham reigns supreme. . . . For pure, elegant, efficient beauty, [he] is astounding."― The Washington Post

"There are sentences her so powerfully precise and beautiful that they almost hover above the pages." — Entertainment Weekly

"[Cunningham's] vigorous explorations of art and its meaning—along with a thick veil of eroticism—keep the pages turning." — People (four stars)

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.