Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37509 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Hours is both a homage to Virginia Woolf and very much its own creature. Even as Michael Cunningham brings his literary idol back to life, he intertwines her story with those of two more contemporary women. One grey suburban London morning in 1923, Woolf awakens from a dream that will soon lead to Mrs.Dalloway. In the present, on a beautiful June day in Greenwich Village, 52-year-old Clarissa Vaughan is planning a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of an AIDS-related illness. And in Los Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown, pregnant and unsettled, does her best to prepare for her husband's birthday, but can't seem to stop reading Woolf. These women's lives are linked both by the 1925 novel and by the few precious moments of possibility each keeps returning to. Clarissa is to eventually realise:

There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined ... Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.

As Cunningham moves between the three women, his transitions are seamless. One early chapter ends with Woolf picking up her pen and composing her first sentence: "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." The next begins with Laura rejoicing over that line and the fictional universe she is about to enter. Clarissa's day, on the other hand, is a mirror of Mrs. Dalloway's--with, however, an appropriate degree of modern bevelling as Cunningham updates and elaborates his source of inspiration. Clarissa knows that her desire to give her friend the perfect party may seem trivial to many. Yet it seems better to her than shutting down in the face of disaster and despair.

Like its literary inspiration, The Hours is a hymn to consciousness and the beauties and losses it perceives. It is also a reminder that, as Cunningham again and again makes us realise, art belongs to far more than just "the world of objects." --Kerry Fried

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

Irish Times
"A major achievement from a writer who has earned every work of priase yet directed at him. Not only is The Hours a mahor achievement for Cunningham, it is important for fiction."

Customer Reviews

Please read this book (again!)
I felt compelled to write a review of this book since two of the previous reviewers only gave it two stars. Don't believe it!!

This is a truly inspiring and deeply thought-provoking book, based on a profound appreciation of Woolf's novel. It is written with marvellous economy and scholarship, tightly structured around a single day in the lives of three women. The meeting of two of the characters in the final chapter is the least important of the linkages between the three strands and after all that has gone before seems partly irrelevant.

The themes of 'Mrs Dalloway' which the book picks up and develops are among the most simple and entrancing - love, loss, consciousness, how and why we go on living. And I'm sure there's plenty that I missed.

I'm looking forward to re-reading this book and I do encourage those readers who didn't appreciate it first time round to do the same. This powerful little book may not reveal all it's depths to you without a little work but that should do nothing to diminish your enjoyment of it.

Simply brilliant.
I am compelled to write an impromptu review, seeing that the only other reviewer saw fit to allow a paltry 2 stars to this elegant gem of a book. I first read The Hours over a year ago, after reading several glowing newspaper and magazine reviews. I was not disappointed. This little novel has really stuck in my mind-- I'm sure I will read it again and again in my lifetime.

The great accomplishment of this novel is the way that Cunningham has absolutely captured Virginia Woolf-- her life, her spirit, and her writing style. Had I not known otherwise, I would never have believed that this was written by a man. Her wit, the off-center brilliance of her observations, her malaise and isolation, are all perfectly captured here. But the GENIUS of the story is the way in which her life, and most especially her death, are not made to seem sad, but beautiful and poetic in a way that touches us all. He shows this by linking Woolf in unexpected ways to the lives of two very different women living in different eras. Great literature is transcendant in ways that we rarely appreciate in our day-to-day lives; Cunningham has shown that there can be great poetry and meaning even in shopping, baking, and death.

seventeen and impressed
I was getting sick of harry potter, I couldn’t handle the hype anymore, so for my next book I wanted a more mature angle to it with no broomsticks in sight!
I needed a book for a school project, a book with enough detail and inspiration to have a basis for an essay. I looked no further than ‘the hours’.
At first I was a bit unsure if it was the right choice but once I started reading I just refused to put it down. This book was by far one of the most inspirational, moving and emotional that I have ever read.
As I read many of the reviews I can see many adults reviewing their best parts of ‘the hours’ and practically writing a whole essay in doing so. But for a book that would blow away a seventeen year old boy, leave him questioning life, leave him out of breath, leave him with a tear on his cheek has to get more than a patronizing “Well done” it deserves more so much more.