Die Stunden

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A day in the life of three women: Clarissa Vaughan walks through the streets of New York on a bright June morning. It is the vibrant New York of the late nineties. Clarissa wants to buy flowers for a party she is throwing that evening for her friend Richard, who is suffering from AIDS and has just won a major literary prize. They have known each other for decades and were even a couple for a short time. Richard has nicknamed her Mrs Dalloway because she reminds him of the heroine in Virginia Woolf's novel of the same name.

Laura Brown is married to a war veteran who takes great care of her, her little son loves her dearly and she is pregnant for the second time. But housewife life in a suburb of Los Angeles overwhelms her. One day in 1949, she escapes from her everyday duties, rents a room in a hotel and reads "Mrs Dalloway" with fascination.

In 1923, Virginia Woolf is struggling with the beginning of her new novel, which she has given the working title "The Hours" and which will one day be called "Mrs Dalloway". She has a headache and hears voices, and she misses the big city, although she knows that a retreat to the countryside in Richmond will do her good. She almost gets on the train to London, only almost, because now she writes the first sentence: "Mrs Dalloway said she wanted to buy the flowers herself."

In his overwhelmingly beautiful and moving novel, Michael Cunningham describes a day in the life of these three women. Inspired by Virginia Woolf's life and work, he creates a world all of its own, centred around the possibilities of friendship and love, the absorption of failure and the weariness of life, and a community beyond life and death: literature.