The Hours (Collins Modern Classics)

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. 

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.

About the Author

Michael Cunningham is the author of six novels including A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours, Specimen Days, and non-fiction book, Land’s End: A Walk Through Provincetown. The Hours was awarded both the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award and made into an internationally acclaimed, Oscar-winning film. He lives in New York.

Reviews

"The Hours is a book which heightens the perception of the reader. Cunningham’s craftsmanship is overwhelming" —Independent on Sunday

"An extremely moving, original and memorable novel" —TLS

"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

"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

Dimensions: 12.9 x 2 x 19.8 cm