By Nightfall
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By Nightfall
Buy Now for $21.99
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Narrated by:
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Hugh Dancy
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.
©2011 Michael Cunningham (P)2011 HarperCollins Publishers LimitedCritic 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
The comfortably off, 45 yo, living in NYC with his wife, Rebecca.
Peter runs his own art gallery/ acquisition business, whereas Rebecca works for a struggling magazine.
Into their busy lives come Nathan aka Mizzy, Rebecca’s much younger, by two decades brother.
Affectionately referred to as “ Mizzy” because he was a mistake.
The only boy in a family of three girls , Mizzy is beautiful, doted on, but lost.
He arrives at the Harris’s after being one year sober recovering drug addict.
Looking for a possible job involving something to do with art , but not sure what exactly, he is rudderless.
One thing for certain is, that his presence in the loft apartment causes Peter to analyse his current life
His job, his marriage, his life up to this point, and whether he has settled and become …
Shock Horror!
Became ordinary.
The other issue Peter is having is his sexuality,… as he finds himself drawn to his beautiful, fractured, nephew.
( by marriage)
This book is all from Peter’s inner monologue POV, as he try’s to cope with all off the above.
Eventually, the sexual tension between Peter and the young Mizzy spills over.
This incident between them is the catalyst for Peter to eventually fess up to Rebecca about the secret s he has been hiding.
However, by the time he does, she also had had an epiphany her own.
This is the kind of story that you have to pay attention to, as Peter thoughts tend to go off into the oddest tangents .
And after all the ramblings and inner musings as he questions every decision he is making, does he end this story with some kind of awakening?
You’ll have to read it yourself find out
An Interesting Take On A Husband & Wife Relationship Going Through Mid Life Reassessment.
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Astonishingly fine performance by narrator
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