Michael Cunningham brings together his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with the masterpiece that
inspired it Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. In The Hours the acclaimed author Michael
Cunningham draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf and the story of her novel
Mrs. Dalloway to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the
conflicting claims of love and inheritance hope and despair. In this edition Cunningham
brings his own Pulitzer Prize-winning novel together with Woolf's masterpiece which has long
been hailed as a groundbreaking work of literary fiction and one of the finest novels written
in English. The two novels published side by side with a new introduction by Cunningham
display the extent of their affinity and each illuminates new facets of the other in this
joint volume. In his introduction Cunningham re-creates the wonderment of his first encounter
with Mrs. Dalloway at fifteen-as he writes I was lost. I was gone. I never recovered. With
this edition Cunningham allows us to disappear into the world of Woolf and into his own
brilliant mind.
