Rating: 
Summary: Truly deserving
Review: Pulitzer Prize-winning books have begun to disappoint me. But not this one; its truly deserving.Wonderfully conceived and executed, anyone with a knowledge of Virginia Wolffe and her books will be enthralled. One of the few books I've read by a male who was able to fully realize and honestly portray a female character. A joy to read.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: The Hours is great literature. It is beautifully written. One should follow reading this book with Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. One can understand what he is trying to accomplish and it makes reading Woolf that much easier. It deserved to win the Pulitzer Prize.
Rating: 
Summary: Exquisitely done...
Review: Not only the Pen/Faulkner award winner for fiction, this Pulitzer prize winner is a profound and moving novel. The story weaves together the lives of three different women (in three different periods of time). Each of the women's lives is experienced by the reader for only a matter of hours on a given day. Virginia Woolf who is recovering outside of London after (we assume) a nervous breakdown (or a suicide attempt?), Laura Brown who is a suburban housewife (in the 1950s) who is beginning to realize that her lovely home and family are stifling her, and Clarissa Vaughn who is in the process of planning a party for a dear old friend who has just won an important literary prize and is dying of AIDS in NYC . The reader spends a few hours with each of these women (alternating chapters), inside their heads as they go about the business of living on the given afternoons the author has chosen to share with us. I only wish that I had read Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" before reading this novel as it would have made the experience of this novel that much more complete. Cunningham's writing is exquisite, his ability to realistically put into the voices of these women what people actually think and muse about and are troubled by, is simply a gift. To quote the back cover, ".. the (three) stories become intertwined, and finally come together in an act of subtle and haunting grace." Perfectly put. A must read.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining and provoking
Review: I was pleasantly surprised -- over and over again -- with this book. As a reader without much interest in Virginia Wolff the person, I wasn't expecting such compelling fiction. I fell into the patterns and themes of the book immediately and Cunningham did a wonderful job of telling the stories without explaining them. Overall, I think it's as interesting as one can make a Virginia Wolff story to those like me who have only a passing iterest in her personally. It certainly spoke to my sense of literature and art and I recommend it to anyone who's not afraid to open their mind to possibility and coincidence.
Rating:
Summary: A story that is bigger than itself.
Review: Cunningham's style is so poignant and straightforward that he needs only a few words to describe truth and character in a complex story. He deftly ties in the creativity of Virginia Woolf, and reminds all of us passionate readers why it is we love to read so much. If you are interested in how people's lives touch one another and how creative thought is the one of the best vehicles for that contact, read this book.
Rating:
Summary: like reading poetry
Review: It took me a while to get into this one, but once I was in I couldn't put it down. The novel did such a good job of intertwining the lives of the three women that their connection to each other seemed to form itself without any help from the author. I really got to know, understand, and relate to these three seemingly wildly different women.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This is easliy the best book I've read in a year. It has haunted me in the weeks since I finished it.
Rating:
Summary: A treasure
Review: don't worry about the comments from Singapore, the reviewer did say too much, but wasn't necessarily accurate about who witnessed what, the "surprise" mentioned was not the only possible interpretation supported by the details in the novel. This was an outstanding book, can't recommend it highly enough. It is made more meaningful if the reader has read "Mrs Dalloway" (or at least seen the film with Vanessa Redgrave) but the novel can be fully appreciated on its own merits. It is contemporary, but beautifully written; the language is concise and finely-wrought just like Virginia Woolf's prose. The book is a sinfully easy pleasure to read. I am grateful to have read it, and will read it again.
Rating:
Summary: hey Singapore
Review: The reader from Singapore who wrote the first review on The Hours has done the rest of us a great disservice by revealing the ending. Glad you liked the book, but did you have to go and blow the surprise like that?
Rating:
Summary: true to the spirit of Woolf
Review: I must say I'm a bit surprised by the vicious attacks launched at Cunningham, especially by readers who admit they have not read anything by Woolf -- there is the first mistake. Though I haven't read Mrs. Dalloway in quite a while, I have read To the Lighthouse (one of my all time favorite novels) and Cunningham captures her genius perfectly! This book demands a certain amount of concentration on the reader's behalf, but it's worth it. If you have ever read anything by Woolf, you will immediately appreciate the nuance of his language. It's not pompous just because he gets the prosody and rhythm of Woolf right on the nose! Normally I don't like split narratives that jump from chapter to chapter, but Cunningham does it so seamlessly and with such a feel for the 3 main characters that I found myself drawn into all three story lines. I don't want to reveal how they all come together, but let's just say they do, and with a bang. To give an idea of the kind of subtlety Cunningham displays, let me give one example: Lara Brown, the housewife, feels unconnected to her husband and 3 year old child and all she wants to do is finish reading Mrs. Dalloway. But, since it's her husband's birthday, she follows the expected role and tries to make him a fantastic cake. When the cake turns out to be amateurish and imperfect, she becomes almost suicidally depressed and decides to throw it out and start again. The scene continues, but the disappointment with the cake takes on a life of its own. Readers of To the Lighthouse will be reminded of the central dining scene when Mrs. Ramsey prepares a magnificant feast in much the same vein for her family. Cunningham's writing and grasp of Woolf is inspired -- I can see why he got the Pulitzer Prize. For those who criticize, be sure to catch up on your Woolf before nailing Cunningham to the cross. It's really a terrific book.
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