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Title: By Nightfall

Author: Michael Cunningham

Narrator: Hugh Dancy

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins

Language: English

Release date: 04-27-12

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 7 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Meet Peter and Rebecca Harris: mid-40s denizens of Manhattans SoHo, nearing the apogee of committed careers in the artshe a dealer, she an editor. With a spacious loft, a college-age daughter in Boston and lively friends, they are admirable, enviable contemporary urbanites with every reason, it seems, to be happy. Then Rebeccas much younger lookalike brother, Ethan (known in the family as Mizzy, the mistake), shows up for a visit. A beautiful, beguiling 23-year-old with a history of drug problems, Mizzy is wayward, at loose ends, looking for direction. And in his presence, Peter finds himself questioning his artists, their work, his careerthe entire world he has so carefully constructed.

By Nightfall is a heartbreaking look at the way we live now. Full of shocks and aftershocks, it makes us think and feel deeply about the uses and meaning of beauty and the place of love in our lives.

Members Reviews:

Life imitating art

This is not as ambitious as "The Hours", but there are moments where it surprises in all the right ways.Ostensibly a story about Peter Harris at midlife, expiating the ghost of his dead brother who died of AIDS, by toying with his attraction to his young brother in law. He is desparate for something to refresh in him a feeling of possibility and vigor. The art he peddles in his Manhattan gallery is not going to do it for him, and he is acutely aware that finding and representing an artist who is really a genius is not in all likelihood going to materialize. His wife seems to have settled for too much mediocrity too, and he muses over his sense of their mutual dissipation and waste. Her troubled younger brother, Mizzy, arrives on their doorstep, looking for a place to stay while he sorts out his future. His beautiful body, and his air of doomed frailty and dependence, provoke his sister and her husband into believing that if they can secure him in their private orbit, if they can curate him, angle the light properly and hang him on their wall, that the traumas and resentments of their childhoods will be "fixed". It never occurs to either husband or wife that their restlessness is reciprocal, and that they both want to possess Mizzy and appropriate him for their private collection.They have been steadily deluding themselves all along that their spouse, ordinary and mundane, is the source of their marital doldrums, and that they alone dream of freedom.

Cunningham is an artist, and a pretty accomplished one. He is particularly good at catching the disconnect between what is said aloud and what is not said aloud, giving us a fine look at Peter's inner self, but also his wife's too. Peter Harris comes to realize he has been neglectful of his responsibility to enter into the thoughts and needs of the women he loves, but we cannot blame Cunningham for missing anything. He seems to have a fine eye for the nuance of married small talk, and the big things that are not said, where every word is chosen for its power to provoke, and evry unspoken word is tacitly heard.

HE WAS GUILTY OF THE TINY CRIMES....

Peter and Rebecca Harris, living a life of comfort and plenty in Manhattan's SoHo district, seemingly revel in their life committed to the arts. They are living in a lovely loft, with their daughter away at college; wonderful times supposedly are in store for them.