By Nightfall: A Novel

Book Description

A New York Times Bestseller

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist *Starred Review* Peter Harris, a dispirited Soho gallery owner in his midforties, arrives home to find his wife in the shower and marvels at how lithe she looks through the steam, then realizes that he's admiring her much younger brother. Called the Mistake, or Mizzy, he's a lost soul, a junkie and moocher as sexy as he is manipulative. Mizzy appears just as Peter, brooding, romantic, and self-deprecating, is grappling with his failings as a father and an art dealer. Ceaselessly observant, Peter senses, or hopes for, "some terrible, blinding beauty" that will topple his carefully calibrated life, and why shouldn't it be his alluring, feckless brother-in-law? Even if this mad infatuation stems from Peter's deep grief for his brilliant and fearless gay brother, who died of AIDS. In his most concentrated novel, a bittersweet paean to human creativity and its particularly showy flourishing in hothouse Manhattan, virtuoso and Pulitzer winner Cunningham entwines eroticism with aesthetics to orchestrate a resonant crisis of the soul, drawing inspiration from Henry James and Thomas Mann as well as meditative painter Agnes Martin and provocateur artist Damien Hirst. The result is an exquisite, slyly witty, warmly philosophical, and urbanely eviscerating tale of the mysteries of beauty and desire, art and delusion, age and love. --Donna Seaman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours won both the Pulitzer Prize and a PEN/Faulkner Award, and became an Academy Award-winning film, starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep. An earlier novel, A Home at the End of the World, was recently made into a film, starring Colin Farrell, Dallas Roberts, Sissy Spacek, and Robin Wright Penn. He lives in New York.