Unsayable
Format:Hardback
Publisher:HarperCollins Publishers
Publishing:23rd Jul '26
£16.99
This title is due to be published on 23rd July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A Powerful Memoir from a Pulitzer Prize-Winning Writer
An intimate memoir portraying a life spent trying to describe the indescribable—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of The Hours and Day.
An intimate memoir portraying a life spent trying to describe the indescribable—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of The Hours and Day.
Go ahead. Try using language to slit the skin of mortality to see what’s on the other side.
At the age of three, Michael Cunningham began obsessively collecting the names of things: oak, Chevrolet, finch, tulip, Tupperware… Each word rendered the world ever so slightly more understandable, more describable, kicking off a lifelong love affair with language—one that would, eventually, maybe inevitably, lead him to become a writer.
In Unsayable, Cunningham’s memories spill forth, and with them, reflections on the craft of writing. He is fifteen, in a swimming pool at night, gazing at the first boy he ever fell in love with, who is lost in contemplative silence. He is a new college graduate, setting off for nowhere in a Dodge Dart, hoping to pull meaning (and a novel) from the expanse of America. He is on Cape Cod, regaling an elderly couple with invented tales of sexual escapades. He is in an art gallery, unwittingly having the first in a lifetime of conversations with the man he would marry. A thread ties each beautifully-wrought moment to the next: what is unspoken, what won’t yield to language, what is embellished beyond recognition, what is still left to say.
Luminous, perceptive and powerful, Unsayable is an ode to literature, a meditation on craft and an intimate account of a life spent trying to put into words that which resists depiction. This, it turns out, is the lifeblood of the fiction writer: the impossibility of capturing the human experience, and the relentless desire to try.
Praise for Day:
‘Michael Cunningham displays his great gift for creating memorable characters, for noticing the world in all its oddness and beauty, for writing about love and loss in tones that are both unsparing and tender’ Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn
‘Day is a novel about the collisions of love within our days. Michael Cunningham crafts a glorious sentence and at the same time he tells an achingly compelling story that speaks precisely to the times we live in. And it all flows so damn gorgeously that at times you just want to suspend the sacred day itself and hold it close, never let it, or the characters, go. A brilliant novel from our most brilliant of writers’ Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon
‘Cunningham, the perennial master of rendering the quotidian with a profound and deeply considered eye for human frailty, returns with a book that exemplifies the hallmarks of his style: lush, erudite, voracious in its seeking, and, like a true poet, remakes the world in his descriptions, freshened with care, compassion, and tinged with radiant heat of grief. What a quietly stunning achievement’ Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
‘Cunningham is one of our great American writers, and here is another masterpiece. Day shows all his extraordinary gifts of epic sweep and intricate detail, lyrical language and plain hard words, memory and imagination, love and hope and loss. It does what only great books can do. Read it and be changed’ Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less
‘Few writers capture the crazy contradictions of modern life with as much clarity and wisdom as Michael Cunningham. Day glows with beauty and energy; its characters slip off the page and into your life’ Tash Aw, author of We, the Survivors
'To read Day is to spend time with a master at the height of his powers. In one of his finest novels yet, Cunningham writes with a quiet, sublime grace about the way time gives shape to our love, longing and loss' Jordan Tannahill, author of The Listeners
ISBN: 9780008836382
Dimensions: 222mm x 141mm x 21mm
Weight: 270g
144 pages