Out October 15, 2024
from Black Cat/Grove Atlantic
★ Named a Best Book of the Year by Bookshop, Debutiful, and Chicago Review of Books
An IndieNext Pick ★ A Phenomenal Book Club Pick ★ A Goodreads Editors’ Pick ★ A Bookshop Editors’ Pick ★ A Ms. Magazine October Pick ★ A Most Anticipated Book by The Millions and Electric Literature
From the National Book Award-winning translator, an exquisite, 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 video calls across borders.
“By many measures, Bruna Dantas Lobato is quite the literary star.” —Celia McGee, THE NEW YORK TIMES
★ “In her first novel, Dantas Lobato shows that her talent as a writer is at least as tremendous as her talent as a translator.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
★ “This debut novel is sheer magic, a perfect read.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“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
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. There, 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, and 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, powerful prose that recalls the work of Sigrid Nunez, Katie Kitamura, and Rachel Khong, Bruna Dantas Lobato paints a tender 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.
PRAISE FOR BLUE LIGHT HOURS
“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)
“[Dantas Lobato’s] sentences possess this delicious illusion of plainness, this matter-of-fact feel in the voice, which is so masterful at moving us without realizing the work each sentence is doing until we are hit with the end of the paragraph. . . Intricate and meticulously crafted with so much pathos, longing, sadness, and love humming under the surface. ” —Ananda Lima, BOMB
★ “This is a slim work with a narrow focus that belies the depth of its own emotion, the profundity of Dantas Lobato’s observations . . . There’s a quiet lyricism to Dantas Lobato’s prose, an elegance both to her sentences and to the shape of the book as a whole. It’s a work you could read in an afternoon or linger over for an entire winter, finding something new to savor on each page . . . In her first novel, she shows that her talent as a writer is at least as tremendous as her talent as a translator.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
★ “This debut novel is sheer magic, a perfect read. It exudes a palpable warmth, and there’s no waste in verbiage or plot.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“A profoundly illuminating meditation on language . . . [Jhumpa Lahiri] may be the best living point of comparison for Dantas Lobato’s craft . . . For Dantas Lobato, and for her narrator, there is no English text without its Portuguese counterpart, no story without an origin, no daughter without mother, no immigrant without birthplace—but there is also no immigrant without a new home, no daughter without an identity of her own, no story without a middle, and an end, and no Portuguese, anymore, without English layered atop it, redefining, translating, forcing a fictionalizing cycle.” —Mara Cavallaro, Cleveland Review of Books
“Quietly poignant, this debut speak to the power of mother-daughter relationships across time and borders.”—Ms. Magazine
“At under 200 pages, it’s a novel to savor, filled with elegant prose and a beautiful exploration of family, loneliness, and the evolving sense of home. A gentle, sometimes sly campus-adjacent immigrant coming-of-age story.” —Ariana Valderrama, Chicago Review of Books
“Thus begins a story of love, a soul saving relationship, the immigrant experience, and the journey of an emerging adult who is maturing and developing her identity and in a foreign culture . . . It also gifts the reader with a genuinely loving mother-daughter relationship, which is shared by the glow of a computer screen and the blue light next to it . . . It’s that deeply emotional, clear writing that conveys so much in Dantas Lobato’s writing. She says so much with so few words we don’t have to imagine what is going on, we feel it and see it and hear it. That is the gift of good writing.” —Elayne Clift, New York Journal of Books
“Blue Light Hours closely observes the bond [the mother and daughter] tenaciously maintain through video calls—not knowing when they’ll see each other again, not knowing how they’ll be changed by the experience as their days apart become months, and then years . . . It’s using the small and the quiet to speak to great emotion and great depth of feeling . . . The book is such a love letter.” —Kate Doyle, Write or Die Magazine
“Bruna Dantas Lobato’s debut novel, Blue Light Hours, is a rare, slim book that feels like a shard. It slips under your skin; you hardly notice the work it’s doing until you’ve put it down and the world feels slightly off-kilter.” —Anna Polonyi, Full Stop
“Unmistakably original is [Dantas Lobato’s] sensibility: she explores her protagonist’s life and surroundings like a dowsing rod, poking into closets, corners, cupboards. Her work vibrates when it touches the tender, or the amazing, that is hidden in plain sight in everyday things . . . It’s the pleasure of these apercus that keeps one turning the pages, reading Blue Light Hours not so much for the story as for the author’s unimpeachable noticing.”—Kai Maristed, Arts Fuse
“There is a lot to praise in Dantas Lobato’s book but I have to compliment one thing: the vibes. This book felt right. It is quiet and haunting as it invites readers to meet a Brazilian woman who is spending her first year in America away from the comforts and love of home. She encapsulates loneliness and longing while offering a future filled with love on the horizon.”—Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful
“Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut. Who’s it for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER!”—The Millions
“A gorgeous and tender story about how we try to manage our freedom, to find ourselves in a life we have built elsewhere, while still sometimes clinging to each other as we always did before.” —Yvette Benavides, Texas Public Radio
“A remarkably tender and warm-hearted mother-daughter story. A perfect book to send a loved one living away, but be sure to get yourself a copy, too.” —Keith M., Powell’s Picks
“A mesmerizing debut that mines the everyday lives of a mother and daughter, separated by 4,000 miles, to profound effect.” —Largehearted Boy
“I was deeply touched by the humanity explored.” —The Mookse and the Gripes
“Beautiful, touching, and powerful, readers will fall in love with Bruna Dantas Lobatos’s Blue Light Hours.” —Phenomenal Book Club
“A meditation on love, loneliness, and obligations between mothers and daughters . . . The writing is beautiful and sharp, creating a yearning that lingers long after you’ve stopped reading.” —Story Street Writers
“Both melancholic and mesmerizing . . . The prose itself embodies loneliness: crisp, declarative sentences that have the flow and rhythm of poetry. Blue Light Hours is an intimate meditation on home and homesickness, belonging and wanting to belong, on what it means to leave and be left, and the many tiny ways of attempting to bridge an impossible distance.”—BookPage
“[A] subtle, contemplative story of a mother and daughter divided by 4,000 miles, who come together via screentime and memory. With love, care, quiet humor, and pervasive yearning, this thoughtful story explores the dilemmas of coming of age and leaving home, the tension between separation and connection . . . It tells painful, beautiful truths . . . Dantas Lobato’s careful, lovely prose will linger long after these pages end.”—Shelf Awareness
“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.”—Flávia Stefani, Electric Literature
“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
“Quietly melancholic and perfect for fall reading.”—Goodreads Editors’ Pick (October)
“Set against the backdrop of changing seasons, this poignant and intimate story explores sacrifice, identity, and hopeful beginnings with a fresh perspective.” —Bookshop Editors’ Pick
“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
“Reading Blue Light Hours, I found myself first pensive, then intrigued, then wildly moved and completely captured. You won’t regret any time spent with Bruna Dantas Lobato’s delicate and wise constructed universe of connection, of loss, of the immigrant’s privations, of radiant love.” ―Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different, finalist for the National Book Award
“Out of a maelstrom of daunting themes—including migration, illness, and single parenthood—sails this quiet and utterly beautiful novel of daughterly devotion. At once an ode to family and a paean to independence, Blue Light Hours renders the private textures of digital intimacy with more subtlety and tenderness than any other book I can think of.” —Maggie Millner, author of Couplets
“Blue Light Hours is a melancholy, strange, and love-suffused book, exploring a relationship through a medium that connected families around the world long before the Zoom era. Through Skype, a mother and daughter a continent apart create a dreamlike, almost womblike space, wrestling an uncanny closeness from a distance of thousands of miles. A quietly beautiful coming-of-age story that never loses sight of the people who come along—or don’t—for the transformation wrought by time and distance.”—Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility
“At times, reading this utterly beautiful book, I thought I could not bear the tenderness of it. Bruna Dantas Lobato has written an aching portrait of the mother and child bond, with all its love and sadness, with such wisdom and capacious humanity. The yearning in these pages will haunt me.” —Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
“Bruna Dantas Lobato is one of those examples with which we are gratifyingly reassured that the future of literature is bright indeed.”—Rick Moody