The Hours: A Novel [Paperback]

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

InThe Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The narrative of Woolf's last days before her suicide early in World War II counterpoints the fictional stories of Samuel, a famous poet whose life has been shadowed by his talented and troubled mother, and his lifelong friend Clarissa, who strives to forge a balanced and rewarding life in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family.

Passionate, profound, and deeply moving, this is Cunningham's most remarkable achievement to date.

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAMis the author of the novelsA Home at the End of the World,Flesh and Blood,Specimen Days,By Nightfall, andThe Snow Queen, as well as the collectionA Wild Swan and Other Tales, and the nonfiction bookLands End: A Walk in Provincetown. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work has appeared inThe New YorkerandThe Best American Short Stories.The Hourswas aNew York Timesbestseller, 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.

The overall impression is that of a delicate, triumphant glance, an acknowledgement of Woolf that takes her into Cunningham's own territory, a place of late-century danger but also of treasurable hours.
Michael Wood, The New York Times Book Review

An exquisitely written, kaleidoscopic work that anchors a floating postmodlƒ`