Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato

About the book:

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.

“Utterly beautiful . . . The yearning in these pages will haunt me.”

—Ayşegül Savaş, author of White on White and The Anthropologists

“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, author of Weather and Dept. of Speculation

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 Translation 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.

Talita Fernandes is a graduate student in International Relations at Johns Hopkins University, having pivoted from a career as a journalist covering politics. Born and raised in Brazil, she loves Latin American literature, with Clarice Lispector, Conceição Evaristo, and João Guimarães Rosa at the top of the list.

Note: this event is up two flights of stairs and Lost City Books does not have an elevator. Please contact [email protected] with any questions.

Host or Publisher Lost City Books