Blue Light Hours

Description

Blue Light Hours
by Bruna Dantas Lobato

ISBN: 9780802163776
Softcover, new
Publication Date 10/15/2024

Brief Description:
“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, 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”–