The Hours

By Michael Cunningham

Categories: Literature & Fiction

The Hours (1998) is Michael Cunningham's novel inspired by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, following one day in the lives of three women across the twentieth century. In 1923, Woolf begins writing her novel in a London suburb; in 1949, California housewife Laura Brown reads it while planning a birthday party; in late-1990s New York, Clarissa Vaughan prepares a celebration for a poet friend living with AIDS. The three strands echo and answer one another without collapsing into one story.

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