The Hours
| Format: | Paperback 240 pages |
|---|
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Synopsis
Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer and Pen/Faulkner prizes, The Hours is a daring and deeply affecting novel inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf. A passionate, profound and haunting story of love and inheritance, hope and despair. Exiled in Richmond in the 1920s, taken from her beloved Bloomsbury and lovingly watched over by her husband Leonard, Virginia Woolf struggles to tame her rebellious mind and make a start on her new novel. In the brooding heat of 1940s Los Angeles, a young wife and mother yearns to escape the claustrophobia of suburban domesticity and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway. And in New York in the 1990s, Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich Village apartment and goes shopping for flowers for the party she is giving in honour of her life-long friend Richard, an award-winning poet whose mind and body are being ravaged by AIDS. These are the characters in Michael Cunningham's exquisite and deeply moving novel, which takes Woolf's life and work as inspiration for a meditation on artistic behaviour, failure, love and madness. Moving effortlessy across the decades and between England and America, Cunningham's elegant, haunting prose explores the pain and trauma of creativity and the immutable relationship between writer and reader.
Book details
Published
07/10/1999
Publisher
Fourth Estate Ltd
ISBN
9781841150352
Publisher and industry reviews
Jacket review
'The Hours is a book which heightens the perception of the reader. Cunningham's craftmanship is overwheming.' Robert Farren, Sunday Independent * 'An extremely moving, original and memorable novel' Hermione Lee, TLS * 'Engrossing, imaginative and humane.' Richard Francis, Observer
UK Kirkus review
This book is inspired by Mrs Dalloway and her complicated creator, Virginia Woolf. Indeed reading the two books simultaneously, comparison can be drawn on a virtually sentence-to-sentence basis. However, The Hours does not rest on the laurels of its inspiration. Set, like Mrs Dalloway, during one summer's day, the book is a penetrating study of humanity, of love, death, madness and sexuality; of our vision of ourselves and of others. Three stories of different periods occupy the day: that of Virginia Woolf herself and her entourage, of Laura Brown in 1940s Los Angeles and of Clarissa Vaughan in 1990s New York. The alternating chapters slide easily in and out of one another, slotting together unexpectedly and wholly naturally in the last chapter. This carefully studied, many-tiered, highly literary book offers an insight into Virginia Woolf and what lay behind her characters and a moving account of the shared experiences of women through the century. (Kirkus UK)
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