num_pages: 230
description: Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found hereIn The Hours, Michael Cunningham, who is recognized as "one of our very best writers" (Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times), draw 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 with 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, and 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 with Virginia Woolf's in an unexpected and heartbreaking way during the party for Richard. As the novel jump-cuts through the twentieth century, every line resonates with Cunningham's clear, strong, surprising lyrical contemporary voice.Passionate, profound and deeply moving, The Hours is Michael Cunningham's most remarkable achievement to date.
language: English
title: The Hours
titlecomplete: The Hours
characters: Laura Brown, Dan Brown (The Hours), Sally (The Hours), Clarissa Vaughan, Leonard Woolf, Louis Waters, Richard Brown, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf
genres: Fiction, Classics, Contemporary, Historical, Queer, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literature, Novels, LGBT
ratings_count: 138340
places: New York City, New York, New York (State), England, Los Angeles, California, Richmond, London, England, United Kingdom, The United States of America, California
awards: awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Pulitzer Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Stonewall Book Award
category: Literature, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Ferro-Grumley Award
category: Gay Fiction, awardedAt: 883641600000
name: Lambda Literary Award
category: Gay Fiction, awardedAt: 883641600000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: Premio Grinzane Cavour
category: Narrativa Straniera, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: Dublin Literary Award
category: Shortlist, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: The Publishing Triangle Award
category: The Ferro-Grumley Awards
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux