Synopsis (credit: back cover)

• In 1920s London, Virginia Woolf is fighting against her rebellious spirit as she attempts to make a start on her new novel.
• A young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of 1940s Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway.
• And Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich Village apartment in 1990s New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a dying friend.

The Hours recasts the classic story of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in a startling new light. Moving effortlessly accross the decades and between England and America, this exquisite novel intertwines the stories of three unforgettable women.

Winner: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1999.
Winner: PEN/Faulkner Foundation Award 1999.
Shortlist: National Book Critics Circle Fiction 1998.
On the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die List.

(Bought second-hand at Help the Rural Child Charity Bookshop, Main Road, Retreat.)

The book forms part of my permanent collection.

Sometimes a book announces itself as a contender for book-of-the-year right from the outset. This was such a book for me.

I read the book immediately after reading Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, something I would strongly recommend. The three stories told in The Hours are so strongly interlinked — not only with each other, but also with Mrs Dalloway — that I welcomed the fresh memory of the book that served as inspiration for this work.

Each of the three stories is told from the perspective of a single day, with memories and introspection covering their respective histories and possible futures. Time, again, plays a central role. The author manages to portray beautifully how the apparently mundane of every-day life forms part of the bigger picture and the profound.

Some excerpts:

"What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run."

"I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then."

"There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be."

"These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius."

"We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so ..."