Michael Cunningham — The Hours

Fourth Estate 1999 Paperback 240 'One grey suburban London morning in 1923, Woolf awakens from a dream that will soon lead to 'Mrs Dalloway'. In the present, on a beautiful June day in Greenwich Village, 52 year old Clarissa Vaughan is planning a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of an AIDS-related illness. And in Los Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown, pregnant and unsettled, does her best to prepare for her husband's birthday, but can't seem to stop reading Woolf. These women's lives are linked both by the 1925 novel and by the few precious moments of possibility each keeps returning to. One early chapter ends with Woolf picking up her pen and composing her first sentence: 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.' The next begins with Laura rejoicing over that line and the fictional universe she is about to enter. Clarissa's day, on the other hand, is a mirror of Mrs Dalloway's - with, however, an appropriate degree of modern bevelling. Clarissa knows that her desire to give her friend the perfect party may seem trivial to many. Yet it seems better to her than shutting down in the face of disaster and despair. Good