The thrill of reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is the feeling of looking into a whirlpool just as something utterly extraordinary materializes for the first time: an exhilarating hallucination of surreal and beautiful images that remain in memory long after you put the book down.

Orlando has it all: life, death, immortality, homoerotic desire, lesbianism, and the evanescence of time. Love, fear, solitude, death, and time-travel—the subjects float by like parasols in the rain. 

Orlando can be found on countless lists of the finest novels of the 20th century, and is one of Virginia Woolf's major achievements. It is considered one of her greatest works after Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse. 

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941), one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, transformed the art of fiction. The author of numerous novels and short stories, she was also an acknowledged master of the essay form, and an admired literary critic.