The Hours by Michael Cunningham (Hardbound)

Format: Hardbound

Condition: vg- condition, some minor shelf wear

Edition: Farrar Straus Giroux/New York, 1998

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters who are struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The novel opens w/ an evocation of Woolf's last days before her suicide in 1941, and moves to the stories of two modern American women who are trying to make rewarding lives for themselves in spite of the demands of friends, lovers and family. Clarissa Vaughan is a book editor who lives in present-day Greenwich Village; when we meet her, she is buying flowers to display at a party for her friend Richard, an ailing poet who has just won a major literary prize. Laura Brown is a housewife in postwar California who is bringing up her only son and looking for her true life outside of her stifling marriage. With rare ease and assurance, Cunningham makes the two women's lives converge w/ Virginia Woolf's in an unexpected and heartbreaking way during the party for Richard. As the novel jump-cuts through the 20th century, every line resonates with Cunningham's clear, strong, surprisingly lyrical contemporary voice. Passionate, profound and deeply moving, The Hours is Michael Cunningham's most remarkable achievement to date.