Specimen Days

In each section of Michael Cunningham's bold new novel, his first since The Hours, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. "In the Machine" is a ghost story that takes place at the height of the industrial revolution, as human beings confront the alienating realities of the new machine age. "The Children's Crusade," set in the early twenty-first century, plays with the conventions of the noir thriller as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist band that is detonating bombs, seemingly at random, around the city. The third part, "Like Beauty," evokes a New York 150 years into the future, when the city is all but overwhelmed by refugees from the first inhabited planet to be contacted by the people of Earth.
　　Presiding over each episode of this interrelated whole is the prophetic figure of the poet Walt Whitman, who promised his future readers, "It avails not, neither time or place ... I am with you, and know how it is." Specimen Days is a genre-bending, haunting, and transformative ode to life in our greatest city and a meditation on the direction and meaning of America's destiny. It is a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.

Book Description
In Specimen Days, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, Michael Cunningham, celebrates America in all its grime and glory, its poetry and its terrors, from the Industrial Revolution to a post-apocalyptic future. As a man, a woman, and a boy reappear in different guises in different centuries, the novel itself moves from a Victorian ghost story, toa contemporary psychological police thriller, and finall a futuristic love story. Featuring Walt Whitman and a metamorphosing New York City, Speciamen Days is a breathtakingly beautiful celebration of the transforming power of love and art through the centuries.

Book Dimension
length: (cm)17.1 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)10.5

Michael Cunningha is the author of the bestselling novel The Hours, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film; A Home at the End of the World, also adapted for the screen; and Flesh and Blood, all published by FSG.He lives in New York.