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Blue Hours (Pre-Order)

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This is a pre-order of Blue Hours and will be available in your Audiobrary app on September 1, 2026. Upon the publication of the audiobook, you will receive a notification in your app and email saying it’s live! However, once you place this order, the project will preemptively appear in your app. In there, you will have an audio message from Julia filling you in on what to expect.

(Run Time: 8:42)

A "spellbinding" (Booklist) mystery linking Manhattan circa 1991 to eastern Afghanistan in 2012, Blue Hours tells of a life-changing friendship between two memorable heroines. When we first meet Mim, she is a recent college graduate who has disavowed her lower middle-class roots to befriend Kyra, a dancer and daughter of privilege, until calamity causes their estrangement. Twenty years later, Kyra has gone missing from her NGO’s headquarters in Jalalabad, and Mim—now a recluse in rural New England—embarks on a journey to find her. "Rich and layered" (Boston Globe) and morally complex, Blue Hours becomes an unexpected page-turner about freedom and America's role in the conflicted, interconnected world.

Daphne KalotayDaphne Kalotay (Author) is published in 20+ languages. She is the author of five books concerning the arts, war, and cultural heritage. Her work includes the award-winning novels Russian Winter, Sight Reading, and Blue Hours, and two story collections: Calamity and Other Stories and, most recently, The Archivists, winner of the Grace Paley Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, among others. Daphne lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she is a Special Program Instructor in the Masters in Creative Writing & Literature Program at Harvard University's Department of Continuing Education.

Julia WhelanJulia Whelan (Narrator) is an author, screenwriter, lifelong actor, and acclaimed audiobook narrator of over 700 titles.

She is, most recently, the recipient of Spotify's Narrator of the Year Award (the most listened-to narrator globally), the first-ever Gracie Award for Best Fiction Narrator (presented by the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation), the SOVAS (Society of Voice Arts and Sciences) Lifetime Achievement Award, and winner of the Audie Award for Best Fiction Narrator of 2025. She also captured both the winner and runner-up slots in the inaugural audiobook category of the Goodreads Choice Awards.

Her latest books — the Audie nominated duet romance, Casanova LLC (coming in print, Spring 2027), and the annotated Victorian poetry anthology The Poetry Of My Oxford Year — debuted exclusively on Audiobrary. jmwhelan.com

“Kalotay is at her spellbinding best... as she brilliantly recreates the yearnings of early adulthood for authentic relationships and a sure foothold on life. Young adults will find much to relate to in this nuanced and dazzling dissection of class and friendship.”—Poornima Apte, Booklist

“Rich and layered ... Kalotay’s sense of place — the physical geography as well as emotional landscape — is as savvy and sharp as her portrait of the friendship between these two women. The novel unfolds cross-continentally, cross-class, cross-hearted, moving from New York City in the early ’90s to Afghanistan in 2012, and in Kalotay’s skilled hands the novel is both richly human and deeply political, exploring how decisions reverberate on both the private and the international stage.” — Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe

“A beautiful novel about two lost women... about the ties we choose, the ties we neglect, and the ties that keep us bound to false selves. What’s more, the scenes in Afghanistan feel fully established and integrated into the rest of the book, especially as Mim encounters myriad paths for women within one country and its wildly different cultures. ... So unexpected that you’ll feel breathless.” — Bethanne Patrick, LitHub

“A sharp portrait of an isolated woman seeking to understand a defining relationship of her past.... This ambitious novel... successfully raises important questions about decisions made on both intimate and global levels.” — Publishers Weekly

“A stirring, admirable tale about the sacrifices we make for love of country and someone beloved....Kalotay unwinds her complicated characters’ stories and emotional pain at a time when America is suffering. Pointedly, she uses her characters to tell a highly polarized, disillusioned nation to pay attention to our nation’s foreign policies. To think about what we want our country to be, which means thinking about the damages inflicted on our citizens and others caught up in endless wars. Messaging that’s easier to swallow fictionally.” — Enchanted Prose

"A gripping adventure story set in modern Afghanistan and a compelling tale of a heartbreaking love triangle. It is also a lyrical exploration of the intensely personal consequences of national political decisions, of actions that affect who and what we are as Americans. This is an important novel for our time.” — Rishi Reddi, author of Passage West and Karma and Other Stories

“What a terrific novel. Only a book this good could move so well from the intensities of youth to the disasters of the global world—love’s joys and miscalculations from the East Village to Afghanistan. Beautifully written, Blue Hours did that rarest of things, it took me places I never expected to go.” — Joan Silber, NBCC award-winning author of Improvement

"In this constantly surprising novel, Kalotay manages to connect an often-forgotten past to the present-day, helping to make sense out of America's place in an often bewildering world, while also tenderly examining what happens to one American's heart and mind when she finally reckons with her own role within it." — Suzy Hansen, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Notes on a Foreign Country: an American Abroad in a Post-American World

“Pitch-perfect prose, transporting the reader to the unexpected with great emotional consequence.”
— MassBook panel