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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, and 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 Virginia Woolf's masterpiece 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 three seemingly disparate threads come together in a profoundly moving and compelling tale of family connections, love, creativity and the struggle to find meaning in life in this exquisite and deeply moving novel. This novel was made into the multi Oscar award nominated film (available on dvd) by Stephen Daldry (of Billy Elliot fame), starring Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, and for which Nicole Kidman won an Oscar award.
Paperback, 230 pages, orig. published 1998, this edition 2008
Author: Michael Cunningham