The_Hours_cunningham
2000 Shortlist

The Hours

ABOUT
THE BOOK

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 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 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 post-war California who is bringing up her only son and looking for her true life outside her stifling marriage. With rare ease and assurance, Cunningham makes the two women’s lives converge with Virginia Woolf’s in an unexpected and heart-breaking way during the party for Richard. As the novel jump-cuts through the twentieth century, every line resonates with Cunningham’s clear, strong, surprisingly lyrical contemporary voice.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Michael
Cunningham

Michael Cunningham was raised in Los Angeles and now lives in New York. His first novel A Home at the End of the World was published in 1990, and his second, Flesh and Blood in 1995. The Hours was awarded both the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award and made into an internationally acclaimed, Oscar-winning film. Specimen Days is his most recent novel. He has written one non-fiction book, Land’s End: A Walk Through Provincetown. He lives in New York.

Photo Credit: Richard Phibbs

Michael Cunningham was raised in Los Angeles and now lives in New York. His first novel A Home at the End of the World was published in 1990, and his second, Flesh and Blood in 1995. The Hours was awarded both the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award and made into an internationally acclaimed, Oscar-winning film. Specimen Days is his most recent novel. He has written one non-fiction book, Land’s End: A Walk Through Provincetown. He lives in New York.

Photo Credit: Richard Phibbs

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