Publisher's Synopsis
Opening with an evocation of Virginia Woolf's last days before her suicide in 1941, the novel imagines the literary idol back to life - back to a gray suburban London morning in 1923 when she awakens from a dream that soon leads to Mrs. Dalloway. Artfully intertwining her story with that of Clarissa Vaughan, a present-day book editor planning a party for her oldest love - a poet who has just won a major literary award and is dying of AIDS - and Laura Brown, a distraught housewife living in postwar Los Angeles and obsessively reading Mrs. Dalloway as she tries to prepare for her husband's birthday, the novel moves with graceful ease, eventually merging the three womens' lives in one unexpected and heartbreaking moment. Passionate, profoundly moving, and written with an ear to Woolf's lyrically shimmering prose, Cunningham's homage to Woolf's talent and humanity is a literary tour de force.
