The Hours

Three women, three cities, one day each, cut together.

In Richmond in 1923 Virginia Woolf wakes with the first sentence of Mrs Dalloway, endures a visit from her sister, escapes toward the station, and is retrieved by a husband who moved them out of London for her health and will not move them back.

In Los Angeles in 1949 Laura Brown is pregnant, reading Mrs Dalloway in bed, and trying to bake a birthday cake for a decent husband and a watchful small son. The cake fails. She makes another. Then she books a hotel room for the afternoon and the reader spends several pages genuinely unsure what she intends to do in it.

In Greenwich Village in the 1990s Clarissa Vaughan goes out for flowers for a party she is throwing for Richard, a poet dying of AIDS who has called her Mrs Dalloway since they were young and who does not want the party.

Cunningham matches Woolf's method rather than borrowing her plot: one ordinary day, minute by minute, with a whole life pressing on it. Each woman also gets a visitor she cannot manage, a sister, a neighbor, an old lover, so the three days rhyme without ever being forced into parallel.

At roughly two hundred and thirty pages it is short and the chapters are shorter, most of them six or eight pages, which makes it far easier to read than its reputation suggests. You do not need to have read Mrs Dalloway, though the last twenty pages hit harder if you have, and the connection between the three strands is held back until then. Expect suicide, illness and a great deal of thinking about whether an ordinary hour is enough. Best for readers who want intensity over incident.