'It was the start of my second new life, in a city that had a spin of its own - a wilder orbit inside the earth's calm blue-green whirl. New York wasn't open to the hopelessness and lost purpose that drifted around lesser places ...' Meet Bobby, Jonathan and Clare. Three friends, three lovers, three ordinary people trying to make a place for themselves in the harsh and uncompromising world of the Seventies and Eighties. And as our threesome form a new kind of relationship, a new approach to family and love, questioning so much about the world around them, so they hope to create a space, a home, in which to live.

Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer and Pen/Faulkner prizes, THE HOURS is a daring and deeply affecting novel inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf. Now a major motion picture, directed by Stephen Daldry (BILLY ELLIOT) and starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Clare Danes and Ed Harris. In 1920's London, Virginia Woolf is fighting against her rebellious spirit as she attempts to make a start on her new novel. A young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of 1940's Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway. And Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich village apartment in 1990's New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a dying friend. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, this exqui