In each section of Michael Cunningham's new book, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. "In the Machine" is a ghost story which takes place at the height of the Industrial Revolution, as human beings confront the alienated realities of the new machine age. "The Children's Crusade," set in the early twentieth century, plays with the conventions of the noir thriller as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist who intends to detonate a bomb somewhere in the city. The third section, "Like Beauty," evokes a New York 150 years into the future, when the city is all but overwhelmed by refugees from the first inhabited planet to be contacted by the people of earth. Presiding over each episode of this interrelated whole is the prophetic figure of the poet Walt Whitman, who promised his future readers, "It avails not, neither distance nor place…I am with you, and know how it is."

Michael Cunningham's most recent, best-selling novel, The Hours, won both the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner award, and became an Academy Award-winning film. An earlier novel, A Home at the End of the World, was recently made into a film; the audiobook starring cast members is available from Sound Library®. Cunningham lives in New York.