The Snow Queen

'What gives The Snow Queen heft and substance is [Cunningham's] gift for language, and the precision with which he anatomises his characters' most secret thoughts. He writes beautifully ... he never averts his gaze from the most uncomfortable and painful complexities of feeling. But the book is also shot through with a dark humour ... Clean and sharp as an ice crystal; a brief but profound and poetic meditation on love, death and compassion from a master craftsman of language' Stephanie Merritt, Observer 'Luminously written... page-turningly enjoyable, this is a profound ... novel about love from a highly regarded, Pulitzer-winning novelist.' Sunday Times 'The pursuit of transcendence in all kinds of forms - music, drugs, a McQueen minidress, and those things less tangible but no less powerfully felt - drives Michael Cunningham's best novel in more than a decade' Megan O'Grady, Vogue 'A thoughtful, closely wrought novel about creativity and dissipation ... What really strikes is Cunningham's remarkable control of tone, his ability to maintain a kind of muted ardency. This is a complicated, messy, peopled novel, and yet it has the slippery feel of a fable, an otherworldly quality in which everyday objects - a barge, a biscuit-coloured couch - acquire a strangeness, a temporary and oddly touching gleam.' Olivia Laing, Guardian 'The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours tells the poignant story of two brothers grappling with religion, ageing and loss.' Mail on Sunday 'Michael Cunningham's resonant new novel ... is arguably [his] most original and emotionally piercing book to date. It's a novel that does not rely heavily on literary allusions and echoes for its power-a story that showcases the author's strengths as a writer' Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times