An introduction to the twentieth century’s most beautiful novel — with a simple plot but an astonishingly complex, even disorienting style. Ten characters spend two ordinary days, ten years apart, at a summer cottage in the western isles of Scotland. But it’s their interior thoughts, impressions, and emotions, rather than exterior events, that carry the narrative forward. Woolf turns tiny details into questions as grand as the nature of love, the habit of art, and (yes) even the meaning of life. 

MEA CULPA: I misquote Shakespeare's Hamlet; it's actually "the trappings [not 'habits'] and the suits of woe" (1.2.86).