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

Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours takes center stage for the Best of the Backlist Book Club at Bookstore1Sarasota. The group examines how Cunningham intricately weaves together the lives of three women across different eras—author Virginia Woolf in the 1920s, a postwar housewife in 1949, and a contemporary New York editor—all bound by the emotional weight of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The discussion highlights the novel's complex structural pacing and its devastating portrayal of mental illness, sexual identity, and domestic suffocation. The meeting offers an academic yet accessible breakdown of a modern literary masterpiece.