The Hours - Libro en Inglés

The Hours – Michael Cunningham

The Hours, by Michael Cunningham, weaves together the stories of three women from different generations whose lives are connected by a single novel, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and by the events of a single day.

In 1923, in a suburb of London, Virginia Woolf herself is beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway. Struggling with her mental health and longing to return to the excitement of London, she wrestles with her art, her marriage to Leonard and the shadows of illness that threaten her.

In 1949, in a suburb of Los Angeles, Laura Brown is a young wife and mother who appears to have the ideal postwar life. Pregnant with her second child, she is planning a birthday party for her husband, Dan, and baking a cake with her young son, Richie. But she feels trapped and disconnected, and she escapes into the pages of Mrs. Dalloway, considering a decision that will have lasting consequences.

In the late twentieth century, in New York City, Clarissa Vaughan is planning a party for her old friend and former lover, Richard, a celebrated poet who is dying of AIDS. Richard has long called her Mrs. Dalloway, and as she moves through the city on a June day, her story echoes Woolf’s novel in subtle ways.

As the novel progresses, the connections among the three women gradually emerge. Cunningham writes with lyrical beauty and insight about love, regret, creativity, illness and the search for meaning in ordinary days.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and adapted into an acclaimed film, The Hours is a luminous work of literary fiction. It deals with suicide and mental illness.