Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning writer DAPHNE KALOTAY—author of Russian Winter and Sight Reading— for a discussion of her latest novel, Blue Hours. She will be joined in conversation by acclaimed writer and environmental attorney RISHI REDDI.
A mystery linking Manhattan circa 1991 to eastern Afghanistan in 2012, Blue Hours tells of a life-changing friendship between two memorable heroines. When we first meet Mim, she is a recent college graduate who has disavowed her lower-middle-class roots to befriend Kyra, a dancer and daughter of privilege, until calamity causes their estrangement. Twenty years later, Kyra has gone missing from her NGO’s headquarters in Jalalabad, and Mim—now a recluse in rural New England—embarks on a journey to find her.
Anchored by an uninvited voyage into an extraordinary place, with a love story at its core, Blue Hours combines the adventure and moral complexity of Lillian Hellman’s Julia and Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder to tell a global story at an intimate level. In its ethical provocations, Blue Hours becomes an unexpected page-turner, confronting America’s role in the conflicted, interconnected world.
Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.