Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer prize and Pen Faulkner prize The third novel from the author of A Home at the End of the World, 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 new 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.
2019 Popsugar Reading Challenge 38. A book told from multiple character POVs
We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep—it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. 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, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so.
— About a day in the lives of three women trying to find meaning in their mundane lives, struggling with the idea that they will continue living the way they do hour by hour, day by day, for the rest of time
