Reviews of By Nightfall:Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times Book Review:
“[Cunningham] makes you turn the pages. He tells a story here, but not too much a story. You aren’t deadened by detail; you’re eager to know what happens next.”
Pam Houston, More:
“In this rueful, daring and expansive novel, Cunningham gives us deep and thrilling access to the mind and heart of a searching, cynical, self-deprecating-except-when-he’s-self-aggrandizing modern male.”
Karen Valby, Entertainment Weekly:
“There are sentences here so powerfully precise and beautiful that they almost hover above the page.”
Very Short List:
“Beautifully written . . . Cunningham manages to perfectly capture post-9/11 New York City, with keen observations about anxiety, fidelity, aging, the art world and the somewhat impossible pursuit of what we think of as happiness.”
Donna Seaman, The Kansas City Star:
“A ravishing and witty tale of yearning and hubris.”
Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review):
“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.”
Nancy Connors, The Plain Dealer:
“Michael Cunningham’s newest novel, By Nightfall, is a slim book that takes on some big issues: the evolving relationship of long-married couples, the often-fraught bond between parents and their adult children, the duty siblings have to one another. But it also enlarges to consider the role that beauty plays in our lives and the necessarily one-sided nature of our relationship with it. By Nightfall is philosophy masquerading as a story . . . Instead of a novel overflowing with flesh and sweat, rage and craziness, Cunningham has given us a well-considered treatise.”
Ellen Kanner, Miami Herald:
“Where art and humanity converge and where they part form a double helix in By Nightfall and account for the novel’s most considered and lovely prose. Cunningham’s observations of our desperate search for the real fill and break the heart.”
Matthew Gilbert, Boston Globe:
“So many of Cunningham’s physical descriptions read like confident prose poems, where you imagine what’s left between the lines . . . As a testament to the richness of the literary imagination, By Nightfall is a success. You can’t read this novel without the sense of how worlds can be found in a drop of water, or in an offhand comment, or in the curve of a vase . . . By Nightfall is a meditation on beauty, and it has its own indelible qualities of beauty.”