A new novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham is coming next year, the Associated Press reports.
Random House will publish Day, Cunningham’s first novel in nearly a decade, in 2024. The press describes the novel as “a searing, exquisitely crafted meditation on love and loss and the struggles and limitations of family life—how to live together and apart.”
The novel follows Dan and Isabel, a married Brooklyn couple who live with their two children and Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. When the Covid-19 pandemic hits, Robbie has moved to Iceland, and Dan and Isabel’s marriage has become fraught.
Cunningham made his literary debut in 1984 with Golden States and followed that up six years later with A Home at the End of the World. In 1998, he published The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award; the novel was adapted into a 2002 Oscar-nominated film directed by Stephen Daldry and featuring a cast including Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore.
His most recent book, the story collection A Wild Swan, was published in 2015. A critic for Kirkus called it “a likable and occasionally provocative set of variations on kid-lit themes.”
Cunningham told the AP that his new novel is “a story about people dealing with something terrible, and it’s about survival, but more centrally it’s a story about love. I’m deeply interested in love—a sense of happiness, of living the life that one has hoped to live. And love is most interesting when it has survived terrible tests.”
Day is scheduled for publication on Jan. 30, 2024.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
