Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ‘The Hours’, time, technology and love are the central concerns of a provocative novel that calls to mind David Mitchell’s ‘Cloud Atlas’.

Lucas, Catherine, Simon: three characters meet time and again in the three linked narratives that form ‘Specimen Days’. The first, a science fiction of the past, tells of a boy whose brother was ‘devoured’ by the machine he operated. The second is a noirish thriller set in our century, as a police psychologist attempts to track down a group of terrorists. And the third and final strand accompanies two strange beings into the future.

A novel of connecting and reconnecting, inspired by the writings of the great visionary poet Walt Whitman, ‘Specimen Days’ is a genre-bending, haunting ode to life itself – a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.