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

In his uncertainty, his immobility, standing stolid in Timberlands, it came to him. He believed— he knew— that as surely as he was looking up at the light, the light was looking back down at him.

No. Not looking. Apprehending. As he imagined a whale might apprehend a swimmer, with a grave and regal and utterly unfrightened curiosity.

He felt the light's attention, a tingle that ran through him, a minute electrical buzz; a mild and pleasing voltage that permeated him, warmed him, seemed perhaps ever so slightly to illuminate him, so that he was brighter than he'd been, just a shade or two; phosphorescent, but pinkly so, humanly so, nothing of swamp gas about it, just a gathering of faint blood- light that rose to the surface of his skin.

And then, neither slowly nor quickly, the light dissipated. It waned into a scattering of pale blue sparks that seemed somehow animated, like the playful offspring of a placid and titanic parent. Then they, too, winked out, and the sky was as it had been, as it has always been.

He remained standing for a while, watching the sky as if it were a television screen that had suddenly gone blank and might, just as mysteriously, turn itself on again. The sky, however, continued to offer only its compromised darkness (the lights of New York City gray the nocturnal blackness), and the sparse pinpoints of stars powerful enough to be seen at all. Finally, he continued on his way home, to Beth and Tyler, to the modest comforts of the apartment in Bushwick.

What else, after all, was he supposed to do?

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.