The Years

Description

A savage indictment of British society at the turn of the century, from the author of Mrs Dalloway. The Years is the story of three generations of the Pargiter family - their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs - mapped out against the bustling rhythms of London's streets during the first decades of the twentieth century. A work of fluid and dazzling lucidity, The Years eschews a simple line of development in favour of a varied and constantly changing style, emphasises the radical discontinuity of personal experiences and historical events. Virginia Woolf's penultimate novel celebrates the resilience of the individual self and, in her dazzlingly fluid and distinctive voice, she confidently paints a broad canvas across time, generation and class.

Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.

'Inspired ... a brilliant fantasia of all Time's problems, age and youth, change and performance, truth and illusion' * The Times Literary Supplement * Her richest and most beautiful novel * The New York Times *