The Hours (Collins Modern Classics)

(Paperback)

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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 which will be repackaged as part of Perennials 2008 fiction promotion.
Exiled in Richmond in the 1920s, taken from her beloved Bloomsbury and watched 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.

Michael Cunninghams exquisite and deeply moving novel is a meditation on artistic behaviour, failure, love and madness. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, Cunninghams elegant, haunting prose explores the pain and trauma of creativity and the immutable relationship between writer and reader.

Reviews

The Hours is a book which heightens the perception of the reader. Cunninghams craftsmanship is overwhelming Independent on Sunday

An extremely moving, original and memorable novel' TLS

Engrossing, imaginative and humane Observer

The Hours refracts the lives of three women through the prism of a single day. Michael Cunningham evokes these three discrete characters with rare skill Financial Times

The concept behind the novel is bold, the execution rich with feeling The Times

A sensitive marriage of intelligence, integrity and finely textured emotions Sunday Times

Cunningham has found an American tone which is exhilaratingly modern tense, tender and completely without strain Guardian

Author Bio

Michael Cunningham is the author of six novels, including A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the PEN / Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days and By Nightfall, as well as Lands End: A Walk in Provincetown. His most recent novel is The Snow Queen. He lives in New York.