Excerpt from The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Still, the idea that, without having been offered any time to prepare for it, he'd never witness the pure careless loveliness of this young man, who was so much like those lithe, innocent young athletes adoringly painted by Thomas Eakins; the idea that Barrett would never again watch the boy peel his briefs off before bed, never witness his lavish, innocent delight in small satisfactions (a Leonard Cohen mix tape Barrett made for him, called Why Don't You Just Kill Yourself; a victory for the Rangers), seemed literally impossible, a violation of love- physics. As did the fact that Barrett would, apparently, never know what it was that had gone so wrong. There had been, during the last month or so, the occasional fight, the awkward lapse in conversation. But Barrett had assumed that the two of them were merely entering the next phase; that their disagreements (Do you think you could try not to be late some of the time? Why would you put me down like that in front of my friends?) were signposts of their growing intimacy. He hadn't remotely imagined that one morning he'd check his text messages and find love to have been lost, with approximately the degree of remorse one would feel over the loss of a pair of sunglasses.

On the night of the apparition, Barrett, having been relieved of the threatened root canal, having promised to floss more faithfully, had crossed the Great Lawn and was nearing the floodlit, glacial mass of the Metropolitan Museum. He was crunching over ice- coated silver- gray snow, taking a shortcut to the number 6 train, dripped on by tree branches, glad at least to be going home to Tyler and Beth, glad to have someone waiting for him. He felt numb, as if his whole being had been injected with novocaine. He wondered if he was becoming, at the age of thirty- eight, less a figure of tragic ardency, love's holy fool, and more a middle manager who wrote off one deal (yes, there've been some losses to the company portfolio, but nothing catastrophic) and went on to the next, with renewed if slightly more reasonable aspirations. He no longer felt inclined to stage a counterattack, to leave hourly voice mails or stand sentry outside his ex's building, although, ten years ago, that's exactly what he'd have done: Barrett Meeks, a soldier of love. Now he could only picture himself as aging and destitute. If he summoned up a show of anger and ardency it would merely be meant to disguise the fact that he was broke, he was broken, please, brother, have you got anything you can spare?

Barrett hung his head as he walked through the park, not from shame but weariness, as if his head had become too heavy to hold upright. He looked down at the modest bluegray puddle of his own shadow, cast by the lampposts onto the snow. He watched his shadow glide over a pine cone, a vaguely runic scattering of pine needles, and the wrapper of an Oh Henry! bar (they still made Oh Henry! bars?) that rattled by, raggedly silver, windblown.

The miniature groundscape at his feet struck him, rather suddenly, as too wintery and prosaic to bear. He lifted his heavy head and looked up.

There it was. A pale aqua light, translucent, a swatch of veil, star- high, no, lower than the stars, but high, higher than a spaceship hovering above the treetops. It may or may not have been slowly unfurling, densest at its center, trailing off at its edges into lacy spurs and spirals.

Barrett thought that it must be a freakish southerly appearance of the aurora borealis, not exactly a common sight over Central Park, but as he stood— a pedestrian in coat and scarf, saddened and disappointed but still regular as regular, standing on a stretch of lamp- lit ice— as he looked up at the light, as he thought it was probably all over the news— as he wondered whether to stand where he was, privately surprised, or go running after someone else for corroboration— there were other people, the dark cutouts of them, right there, arrayed across the Great Lawn . . .

Excerpted from The Snow Queen: A Novel by Michael Cunningham, published in May 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2014 by Mare Vaporum Corp. All rights reserved.