It opens on a June morning in 1920s London. Clarissa Dalloway walks through Bond Street to buy flowers for her party tonight. She is fifty-one, married to a distinguished MP, hostess to London's elite. But beneath the careful arrangements lies a life fully lived and partly wasted, the years with Sally Seton, the choice between Peter Walsh and her husband Richard, the daughter who died, the self she set aside for duty and decorum. Woolf weaves between Clarissa's polished surfaces and her interior torrents, between the present moment and fifty years of memory. Meanwhile, somewhere across the city, Septimus Smith, young, shell-shocked, recently married, sits in a park with his wife Lucrezia, his mind fractured by war he cannot stop seeing. Their paths will cross. Their fates will collide with a force that cracks open everything Woolf has been building. This is a novel about the distance between who we are and who we perform, about time moving through us and within us, about what it means to be alive in a world still reeling from its own violence. It will break you. It will stay with you forever.
