The Blue Hour: A Novel

by Paula Hawkins

Overview

A stylish and immersive new novel of ambition, legacy, and betrayal from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train.

"The best Paula Hawkins yet — by a tense and haunting mile." — Lee Child

An isolated Scottish island, accessible to the mainland only twelve hours a day. An infamous artist whose notoriously unfaithful husband disappeared after visiting her twenty years ago. A present-day discovery that intimately connects three people and threatens a carefully concealed secret.

 A masterful and propulsive novel that asks searing questions of ambition, power, gender and perception, The Blue Hour recalls the very best of Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith and cements Hawkins’s place among the very best of our most nuanced, powerful and stylish storytellers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798874800642
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/08/2024
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Paula Hawkins worked as a journalist for fifteen years before turning her hand to fiction. Born and brought up in Zimbabwe, Paula moved to London in 1989. She now splits her time between London and Edinburgh.

Editorial Reviews

06/24/2024

This predictable offering from bestseller Hawkins (The Girl on the Train) centers on an enigmatic artist, her socially awkward companion, and a lifelong fan of her work. In the present, a Tate Modern retrospective of late painter Vanessa Chapman is cut short when a forensics expert notices that an apparent animal bone in one of her sculptures is actually a human rib bone. James Becker, an employee at the foundation that manages her estate, tries to settle the matter by heading to Eris Island, where Chapman lived for the last decade of her life, and interviewing her companion there, Grace Haswell. Hanging in the air is the 20-year-old disappearance of Vanessa’s husband, Julian, whose body was never found; rumors swirl in the press that the rib bone may have belonged to him. As James and Grace bond over their love for Vanessa, flashbacks illuminate Julian’s fate and the precise nature of Vanessa and Grace’s relationship. Hawkins manages few surprises and fewer insights into her characters, resulting in a narrative that’s curiously uninvolving even as her skills as a stylist are on full display. This fails to add up to more than the sum of its parts. Agent: Simon Lipskar, Writers House. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Reminiscent of du Maurier: art, islands, missing spouses ... A compelling piece of work, hard to put down.”  — Mick Herron

"The best Paula Hawkins yet - by a tense and haunting mile." — Lee Child

"An atmospheric and marvelously twisty novel— Paula Hawkins returns with an examination of legacy, and the mountains we'll move to feel like we belong. THE BLUE HOUR builds a labyrinth of surprises, which deliver through to the very last page." — Danya Kukafka, author of Notes on an Execution

From the Publisher