Specimen Days

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours tells three intertwined, genre-bending stories of love, New York City, and Walt Whitman in this experimental novel.

"Splendid prose in a mesmerizing tale." —Chicago Tribune

"A tour de force." —People (four stars)

"By far, the best gothic historical sci-fi cop thriller you'll ever read." —The Guardian (UK)

In Specimen Days, author Michael Cunningham celebrates America in all its grime and glory, its poetry and terror, from the industrial revolution to a postapocalyptic 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 to a contemporary psychological police thriller and finally a futuristic love story. Featuring Walt Whitman and a metamorphosing New York City, Specimen Days is a breathtakingly beautiful celebration of the transforming power of love and art through the centuries.

"Brilliantly conceived, empathic, darkly humorous, and gorgeously rendered, Cunningham's galvanizing novel about the quest for justice and freedom, the parameters of the soul, the hunger for beauty, and the fluid interface between the natural and the engineered is a genuine literary event." —Booklist (starred review)