Best of the Backlist Book Club: "The Hours" by Michael Cunningham

Led by Georgia Court, we discuss Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Hours." What makes a life worth living? The Best of the Backlist Book Club is led by Georgia Court, meant for reading what lasts, not just what's latest. December's selection is The Hours by Michael Cunningham. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows three women across three different eras: Woolf herself as she begins writing Mrs. Dalloway; a 1950s California housewife reading the novel as she questions the life she has built; and a woman in contemporary New York preparing a party for a dying friend. Their stories echo and intersect in a moving exploration of love, longing, creativity, obligation, and the quiet choices that shape a life. We will meet in person at our store location at The Mark, 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $18, which is the cost of a copy of The Hours by Michael Cunningham to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting. PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: 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. 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.