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. A passionate, profound and haunting story of love and inheritance, hope and despair. Exiled in Richmond in the 1920s, taken from her beloved Bloomsbury and lovingly watched over by her husband Leonard, Virginia Woolf struggles to tame her rebellious mind and make a start on her new novel. In the brooding heat of 1940s Los Angeles, a young wife and mother yearns to escape the claustrophobia of suburban domesticity and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway. And in New York in the 1990s, Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich Village apartment and goes shopping for flowers for the party she is giving in honour of her life-long friend Richard, an award-winning poet whose mind and body are being ravaged by AIDS. These are the characters in Michael Cunningham's exquisite and deeply moving novel, which takes Woolf's life and work as inspiration for a meditation on artistic behaviour, failure, love and madness. Moving effortlessy across the decades and between England and America, Cunningham's elegant, haunting prose explores the pain and trauma of creativity and the immutable relationship between writer and reader.

邁剋爾•坎寜安，美國當代著名作傢，生於一九五二年，曾先後在斯坦福大學和愛荷華大學學習文學和寫作。在愛荷華大學作傢坊學習期間，開始在《大西洋月刊》和《巴黎評論》上發錶短篇小說。一九九〇齣版《末世之傢》，受到廣泛贊譽。選自《末世之傢》的《白天使》被收錄在《一九八九年美國最佳短篇小說》。一九九五年獲得懷廷作傢奬。

一九九八年的作品《時時刻刻》獲得巨大成功，登上《紐約時報》暢銷書榜，同時獲得普利策奬和筆會福剋納奬，並被改編成同名電影，妮可•基德曼憑藉該部影片摘得第七十五屆奧斯卡最佳女主角奬。

一九九九年獲得歐•亨利短篇小說奬。二〇〇五年，沉潛七年推齣的新作《試驗年代》同樣備受好評。坎寜安目前在耶魯大學擔任創造性寫作課程教授，同時繼續創作。