The New York Times bestselling novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours Michael Cunningham's luminous novel begins with a vision. It's November 2004. Barrett Meeks, having lost love yet again, is walking through Central Park when he is inspired to look up at the sky; there he sees a pale, translucent light that seems to regard him in a distinctly godlike way. Barrett doesn't believe in visions―or in God―but he can't deny what he's seen. At the same time, in the not-quite-gentrified Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, Tyler, Barrett's older brother, a struggling musician, is trying―and failing―to write a wedding song for Beth, his wife-to-be, who is seriously ill. Tyler is determined to write a song that will be not merely a sentimental ballad but an enduring expression of love. Barrett, haunted by the light, turns unexpectedly to religion. Tyler grows increasingly convinced that only drugs can release his creative powers. Beth tries to face mortality with as much courage as she can summon. Cunningham follows the Meeks brothers as each travels down a different path in his search for transcendence. In subtle, lucid prose, he demonstrates a profound empathy for his conflicted characters and a singular understanding of what lies at the core of the human soul. The Snow Queen , beautiful and heartbreaking, comic and tragic, proves again that Cunningham is one of the great novelists of his generation. *Starred Review* Like By Nightfall (2010), Cunningham’s elegant and haunting new novel examines the complex dynamics among a couple and a brother. In this configuration, Barrett Meeks, a poetically minded man in his late thirties who has just been dumped by his most recent boyfriend via text message, shares a Brooklyn apartment with Tyler, his older musician-bartender brother, and Beth, Tyler’s great love. Beth and Barrett work in Liz’s vintage shop. She’s 52; her current lover, Andrew, is 28. Beth is undergoing full-throttle treatment for cancer. Tyler is struggling to write the perfect love song for their wedding, and breaking his promise not to do drugs. Barrett, long afflicted by his flitting interest in everything, remains in an altered state after seeing a strangely animated “celestial light” over dark and snowy Central Park. As his characters try to reconcile exalted dreams and crushing reality, Cunningham orchestrates intensifying inner monologues addressing such ephemeral yet essential aspects of life as shifting perspectives, tides of desire and fear, “rampancy” versus “languidness,” and revelation and receptivity. Tender, funny, and sorrowful, Cunningham’s beautiful novel is as radiant and shimmering as Barrett’s mysterious light in the sky, gently illuminating the gossamer web of memories, feelings, and hopes that mysteriously connect us to each other as the planet spins its way round and round the sun. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Pulitzer Prize–winning Cunningham will tour with this resplendent novel in sync with national advertising and extensive online promotion. --Donna Seaman “Regardless of your theological position on signs and wonders, that voice, Cunningham's inimitable style, is the real miracle of The Snow Queen . Sentence by sentence . . . he moves across the surface of these pages like some suave, literary god. Behold how he swoops in and out of Tyler's point of view, breaks the fourth wall, drops ironical quips, mocks and comforts in the same phrase . . . He writes so wisely about the cruel taunting of remission and the way illness both deepens and frays romantic relationships, endowing the dying with a kind of security and purpose that healthy people crave. His portrayal of the once-blessed Meeks brothers, raised in expectation of fame and riches they'll never attain--not even close--is full of affecting pathos.” ― Ron Charles, The Washington Post “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 . . . while creating a potent portrait of two brothers and their urgent midlife yearning to find some sense of purpose and belonging . . . He artfully allows the reader direct access to [his characters'] hearts and minds by using his gift for empathy and his own brand of stream of consciousness . . . A the same time, Mr. Cunningham provides an impressionistic portrait of Brooklyn, circa 2004, and of the East Village, some four years later . . . These snapshots attest to his ability to give us an intimate sense of his characters' daily lives, while situating their hopes and dreams within the context of two moments in history already slipping by.” ― Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “[T]he 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 no