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By Nightfall

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About this listen

From the Pultizer Prize-winning author of ‘The Hours’, 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.

 Anthologies & Short Stories Contemporary Contemporary Romance Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Romance Marriage

Critic reviews

‘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
All stars
Most relevant
It's all too easy to be unsympathetic towards Peter and the crisis that unfurls itself from his centre. But when you give yourself a real chance to listen to his story, you'll feel a true pang of sympathy for him living in his gilded cage.

The literary and art references throughout suited the style and the character.

And Hugh Dancy's narration is spot on.

What does crisis look like?

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The narrative is wonderful, beautifully performed and once Michael told me in a book signing session that Hugh Dancy is a friend of him. The story you would like to follow till the end and there are some unforgettable moments but on the whole it's not as good as his Hours.

Delicate but not as deep as the Hours

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I loved the complexity of the main characters in this story. Michael Cunningham writes like a poet. A wonderful performance, I was entranced by the description of Carol Potters house. Wonderful story and performance, thank you MC, next book please.

A master writer

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