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by Bruna Dantas Lobato
From the National Book Award-winning translator, an atmospheric and wise debut novel of a young Brazilian woman's first year in America, a continent away from her lonely mother, and the relationship they build over Skype calls across borders.
In a small dorm room at a liberal arts college in Vermont, a young woman settles into the warm blue light of her desk lamp before calling the mother she left behind in northeastern Brazil. Four thousand miles apart and bound by the angular confines of a Skype window, they ask each other a simple question: what's the news?
Offscreen, little about their lives seems newsworthy. The daughter writes her papers in the library at midnight, eats in the dining hall with the other international students, and raises her hand in class to speak in a language the mother cannot understand. The mother meanwhile preoccupies herself with natural disasters, her increasingly poor health, and the heartbreaking possibility that her daughter might not return to the apartment where they have always lived together. Yet in the blue glow of their computers, the two women develop new rituals of intimacy and caretaking, from drinking whiskey together in the middle of the night to keeping watch as one slides into sleep. As the warm colors of New England autumn fade into an endless winter snow, each realizes that the promise of spring might mean difficult endings rather than hopeful beginnings.
Expanded from a story originally published in The New Yorker, and in elegant prose that recalls the work of Sigrid Nunez, Katie Kitamura, and Rachel Khong, Bruna Dantas Lobato paints a powerful portrait of a mother and a daughter coming of age together and apart and explores the profound sacrifices and freedoms that come with leaving a home to make a new one somewhere else.
"Dantas Lobato debuts with a delicate story of a student's first year at college and the pain of separation between her and her mother ... Throughout, Dantas Lobato crafts atmospheric details of the pastoral setting and the ersatz intimacy of video calls. This shines." —Publishers Weekly
"By many measures, Bruna Dantas Lobato is quite the literary star. At 33, the Brazilian American has published a cascade of translations, both fiction and nonfiction, from Portuguese to English, and last year won the National Book Award for translated literature. But one story, she said, was missing from her bibliography: her own. With her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, centered on a Brazilian student who sees her close relationship with her mother reduced to a computer screen when she moves to New England for college, she is finally closing that gap." —Celia McGee, New York Times (profile)
"This stunning literary debut packs a punch ... Dantas Lobato's ingenuity resides in crafting a story that at first seems quiet and slow through her meticulous use of white space, uninterested in adhering to conventional plot expectations, but that under the surface commits instead to an accumulation of movement and feeling that feels far truer to this fragmented mother-and-daughter relationship than any grandiose narrative could ... This is the immigrant novel at its tenderest." —Electric Literature
"An astonishingly beautiful novel, full of longing and love. I've never read a mother-daughter story this tenderhearted. It's a revelation." —Jenny Offill, New York Times bestselling author of Weather
"Blue Light Hours is a spellbinding meditation on distance and intimacy, holding close and letting go. In attentive linguistic brush strokes, Bruna Dantas Lobato offers a tender and dynamic portrait of the mutual care between a mother and a daughter as they navigate life apart. Resplendent." —Tess Gunty, author of The Rabbit Hutch, winner of the National Book Award
This information about Blue Light Hours was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Bruna Dantas Lobato is a writer and translator. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, and The Common. She was awarded the 2023 National Book Award in Translated Literature for The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel. Dantas Lobato was born and raised in Natal, Brazil, and lives in St. Louis, Missouri. Blue Light Hours is her debut novel.
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