Skip to main content
Trade Books For Courses Tradebooks for Courses

The Hours

A Novel

Michael Cunningham

Picador

opens in a new window
opens in a new window The Hours Download image

ISBN10: 0312243022
ISBN13: 9780312243029

Trade Paperback

240 Pages

$18.00

Request Desk Copy
Request Exam Copy

TRADE BOOKS FOR COURSES NEWSLETTER

Sign up to receive information about new books, author events, and special offers.

Sign up now

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award

The Hours is the story of three women: Clarissa Vaughan, a beloved friend of ailing poet Richard Brown, who one fine New York morning goes about planning a party in his honor; Laura Brown, who in a 1950s Los Angeles suburb slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home; and Virginia Woolf, recuperating with her husband in a London suburb, and beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway. By the end of the novel, the stories intertwine in remarkable ways, and finally come together in an act of subtle and haunting grace.

Reviews

Praise for The Hours

"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 postmodern world on pre-modern caissons of love, grief, and transcendent longing."—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"[Cunningham] has deftly created something original, a trio of richly interwoven tales that alternate with one another chapter by chapter, each of them entering the thoughts of a character as she moves through the small details of a day . . . Cunningham's emulation of such a revered writer as Woolf is courageous, and this is his most mature and masterful work."—Jameson Currier, The Washington Post Book World

"The triumph of The Hours is that it somehow manages to be both artful and sincere, striking nary a false note . . . And the triumph of the book is no less the triumph of its author. Just when it seemed that it was no longer permissible to pay respect to the literature of the past, Cunningham has done so with an undeniable skill and depth of feeling."—Justin Cronin, The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Rich and beautifully nuanced scenes follow one upon the other . . . [a] gargantuan accomplishment."—Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from The Hours by Michael Cunningham. Copyright © 1998 by Michael Cunningham. To be published in November, 1998 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.


She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for...

Listen to an Excerpt from the Audiobook

Download MP3

MEDIA

Watch

The Hours by Michael Cunningham--Audiobook Excerpt

Listen to this audiobook excerpt and hear Michael Cunningham read from his novel The Hours, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Pen Faulkner Award for Fiction, and adapted into a film that was nominated for 9 Academy Awards.

About the author

Michael Cunningham

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days, By Nightfall, and The Snow Queen, as well as the collection A Wild Swan and Other Tales, and the nonfiction book Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories. The Hours was a New York Times bestseller, 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.

© Richard Phibbs

Pulitzer Prize Website