The Hours - Michael Cunningham

Having found Mrs. Dalloway itself a little inaccessible, I was delighted to find that this re-imagining did a great job of capturing its essence and interpreting it for a modern (lazy?) reader. It is a powerful novel in its own right, beautiful and full of vivid characters, but also full of echoes of Mrs. Dalloway, and a mark of its success for me was that it made me feel that I could go back to the original novel and get more out of it after reading this. Most memorable - and unsettling - for me were the sections about the 40s housewife Mrs. Brown, describing the sense of unreality that can come with being alone at home with a small child: "Alone with the child, though, she loses direction. She can't always remember how a mother would act.".