New Michael Cunningham novel 'Day' scheduled for January

The next novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, his first in a decade, is a family saga set in New York City before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

Books Michael Cunningham

The next novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, his first in a decade, is a family saga set in New York City before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Random House announced Monday that “Day” will be published in January. The novel takes place on three separate days in April, one each in the years 2019-2021.

“I’ve definitely had moments over the last 10 years when I thought, well, if the world is in this kind of shape, who needs a novel?” Cunningham said in a statement. “But maybe it’s during hard times that the world needs novels more than ever."

The author calls the new book “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.”

Cunningham's previous novels, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, include “Specimen Days,” “By Nightfall” and “The Hours,” which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1999 and was adapted into an Oscar winning movie of the same name.