The Hours

The Hours is a novel by the American writer Michael Cunningham, published in 1998. It is a tribute to Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway.

The book is built as a non-linear narrative told mainly through the perspectives of three women across three decades, each of them affected by Woolf's novel in a different way. In 1923, in Richmond, Woolf is at work on Mrs Dalloway while she struggles with mental illness. In 1949, in Los Angeles, Laura Brown is reading the book while planning a birthday party for her husband, who has come back from the Second World War. In 1999, in New York City, Clarissa Vaughan is preparing a party of her own for Richard, a poet whose life has been overshadowed by his talented and troubled mother, and who has been Clarissa's friend for years. Cunningham draws on the narrative of Woolf's last days before her suicide early in the Second World War, and sets it against those fictional lives.

Cunningham's novel takes the structure and much of the method of Woolf's book and applies them to people living decades later, so that the three stories are separate and connected at the same time. It was his third novel, following A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood.