Day

By Michael Cunningham

‘Unsparing and tender’ Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn

‘A brilliant novel from our most brilliant of writers’ Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon

‘A quietly stunning achievement’ Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

As the world changes around them, a family weathers the storms of growing up, growing older, falling in and out of love, losing the things that are most precious – and learning to go on.

In a cosy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. A married couple does their best to hide their growing rift from their children. A brother seeks solace from his break-up in a glamorous online avatar. A son takes his first uncertain steps towards independence, and a daughter obsesses over keeping her family safe.

Set on the same day for three consecutive years and against the unsettling backdrop of the pandemic, Day is a searing, exquisitely crafted meditation on growing older, love and loss and the limitations of family life, from the brilliant mind of Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham.

‘A wrenchingly tender book’Financial Times

‘Through its beautiful feel for all that’s fragile and elusive in life, it finds richness and value in the most seemingly decadent, and universal, concerns’ Telegraph

Format: Paperback
Release Date: 01 Aug 2024
Pages: 288
ISBN: 978-0-00-863759-0
Michael Cunningham’s novels include The Hours, A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall and The Snow Queen, as well as the collection AWild Swan and Other Tales and the non-fiction book Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories. The Hours was a New York Times bestseller and the winner of both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Raised in Los Angeles, Cunningham lives in New York City and is a professor in the practice of creative writing at Yale University.

”'In Day, Michael Cunningham displays his great gift for creating memorable characters, for noticing the world in all its oddness and beauty, for writing about love and loss in tones that are both unsparing and tender. In this book, he also sharply and brilliantly captures contemporary New York” - Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn

”'Day is a novel about the collisions of love within our days. Michael Cunningham crafts a glorious sentence and at the same time he tells an achingly compelling story that speaks precisely to the times we live in. And it all flows so damn gorgeously that at times you just want to suspend the sacred day itself and hold it close, never let it, or the characters, go. A brilliant novel from our most brilliant of writers” - Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon

”'Cunningham, the perennial master of rendering the quotidian with a profound and deeply considered eye for human frailty, returns with a book that exemplifies the hallmarks of his style: lush, erudite, voracious in its seeking, and, like a true poet, remakes the world in his descriptions, freshened with care, compassion, and tinged with radiant heat of grief. What a quietly stunning achievement” - Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

”'Cunningham is one of our great American writers, and here is another masterpiece. Day shows all his extraordinary gifts of epic sweep and intricate detail, lyrical language and plain hard words, memory and imagination, love and hope and loss. It does what only great books can do. Read it and be changed” - Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less

”'Few writers capture the crazy contradictions of modern life with as much clarity and wisdom as Michael Cunningham.Dayglows with beauty and energy; its characters slip off the page and into your life” - Tash Aw, author of We, the Survivors