The Hours

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that became a motion picture starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman, directed by Stephen Daldry from a screenplay by David Hare.

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The narrative of Woolf's last days before her suicide early in World War II counterpoints the fictional stories of Samuel, a famous poet whose life has been shadowed by his talented and troubled mother, and his lifelong friend Clarissa, who strives to forge a balanced and rewarding life in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family.

Passionate, profound, and deeply moving, this is Cunningham's most remarkable achievement to date.

Publisher: Picador USA
Published: 01/15/2000
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.5lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.50w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780312243029

Accelerated Reader:
Reading Level: 6.6
Point Value: 9
Interest Level: Upper Grade
Quiz #/Name: 31227 / Hours


Award: Pulitzer Prize - Winner
Award: Book Sense Book of the Year Award - Nominee
Award: International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award - Nominee
Award: Boston Book Review - Nominee


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly Best Books 01/01/1998 pg. 40
Entertainment Weekly 01/14/2000 pg. 69
New York Times 01/23/2000 pg. 32
Entertainment Weekly 05/25/2001 pg. 74

About the Author
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.