The Hours by Michael Cunningham

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and Pen Faulkner prize. Made into an Oscar-winning film, ‘The Hours’ is a daring and deeply affecting novel inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf.

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 Cunningham’s 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, Cunningham’s elegant, haunting prose explores the pain and trauma of creativity and the immutable relationship between writer and reader.

‘The Hours is a book which heightens the perception of the readerCunningham’s 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

Michael Cunningham’s novels include The Hours, A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, The Snow Queen and Day, as well as the collection Wild Swan and Other Tales and the non-fiction book Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories. The Hours was a New York Times bestseller and the winner of both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Raised in Los Angeles, Cunningham lives in New York City and is a professor in the practice of creative writing at Yale University.