num_pages: 229
description: The Hours is a daring and deeply affecting novel inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf. 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 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 are the characters in Michael Cunningham's exquisite and deeply moving novel, which takes Woolf's life and work as inspiration for a meditation on artistic behaviour, failure, love and madness. Moving effortlessy across the decades and between England and America, Cunningham's elegant, haunting prose explores the pain and trauma of creativity and the immutable relationship between writer and reader.
language: English
title: The Hours
titlecomplete: The Hours
characters: Laura Brown, Louis Waters, Virginia Woolf, Clarissa Vaughan, Sally (The Hours), Richard Brown, Leonard Woolf, Dan Brown (The Hours), Vanessa Bell
genres: Fiction, Historical, Queer, LGBT, Literature, Classics, Novels, Contemporary, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 138345
places: New York (State), The United States of America, Los Angeles, California, New York City, New York, Richmond, London, England, England, California, United Kingdom
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: Fourth Estate