The Hours: A Novel

Michael Cunningham

Jul 1998 · Picador Modern Classics Book 1 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel becomes a motion picture starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman, directed by Stephen Daldry from a screenplay by David Hare.

The Hours tells the story of three women: Virginia Woolf, beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway as she recuperates in a London suburb with her husband in 1923; Clarissa Vaughan, beloved friend of an acclaimed poet dying from AIDS, who in modern-day New York is planning a party in his honor; and Laura Brown, in a 1949 Los Angeles suburb, who slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home. By the end of the novel, these three stories intertwine in remarkable ways, and finally come together in an act of subtle and haunting grace.

The Hours is the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Ratings and reviews

Though the prose was often beautiful, the omniscient narration idea coupled w/ the almost-stream-of-consciousness flow was neat, the ability to represent a real person's thought process was impressive, and the three stories connected interestingly, I did not appreciate the actual message of the book. It was depressing, showed the ultimate futility of finding lasting joy outside of Jesus, and in general did not help to enhance me as a person. I am glad that I read this for all of the positive things I

I like Cunningham's writing style.

vividly

About the author

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, and The Snow Queen, as well as the collection A Wild Swan and Other Tales, and the nonfiction book Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He is the recipient of 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, Michael Cunningham lives in New York City, and is a senior lecturer at Yale University.