Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Preview

£0.00 for first 30 days

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

By Nightfall

By: Michael Cunningham
Narrated by: Hugh Dancy
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Summary

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 Limited
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2
activate_samplebutton_t1

Listeners also enjoyed...

The Hours cover art
Jack Holmes and His Friend cover art
The Forgery of Venus cover art
Women Within cover art
The Mistake cover art
Anna Karenina cover art
The Fountainhead cover art
Young Hearts Crying cover art
Empire of Lies cover art
The Lost Language of Cranes cover art
Mrs. Dalloway cover art
Impostor cover art
The Interestings cover art
So Late in the Day cover art
The Time Traveler's Wife cover art
Brightness Falls cover art

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

What listeners say about By Nightfall

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    18
  • 4 Stars
    12
  • 3 Stars
    9
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    1
Performance
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    23
  • 4 Stars
    3
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    15
  • 4 Stars
    9
  • 3 Stars
    2
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Delicate but not as deep as the Hours

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.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

What does crisis look like?

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.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!