The Blue Hour

A contemporary tale which manages that stunning and rare feat – telling a story of human interaction in a way that is universal, revelatory and suspenseful. As fault lines in American society break apart during the spring of 2012, a puzzling death in a small Midwest college town draws a solitary university archivist into an entanglement of shifting realities. Torn between the memory of old bonds and the difficult present, he must confront a mysterious brew of paranoid politics, campus gossip, and an antique-mall subculture that includes the surprise discovery of unknown letters by Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For this moving story of friendships in crisis, award-winning writer Richard Teleky returns to the narrator of his much-praised novel Pack Up the Moon, now twenty years older and wiser. This is a complex exploration of longing, loss, and the passing of time, ultimately even testing the very nature of friendship itself.

Richard Teleky, a Professor in the Humanities Department of York University, in Toronto, is a critically acclaimed fiction writer, poet, and critic. His books include the novels Winter in Hollywood, Pack Up the Moon, and the award-winning The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin (which received the U.S. Ribalow Prize and was chosen the Vermont Book of the Year), and a collection of short fiction, Goodnight, Sweetheart and Other Stories; two poetry collections–The Hermit in Arcadia and The Hermit’s Kiss; two non-fiction studies–The Dog on the Bed: A Canine Alphabet and Hungarian Rhapsodies: Essays on Ethnicity, Identity and Culture. He is also the editor of The Exile Book of Canadian Short Stories and The Oxford Books of French-Canadian Short Stories. His work has appeared in numerous journals in Canada and the United States, and he is a frequent contributor to Queen’s Quarterly.