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BLUE HOUR

Tiffany Clarke Harrison

What is motherhood in the midst of uncertainty, buried trauma, and an unraveling America? What it's always been - a love song.
Our narrator is a gifted photographer, an uncertain wife, an infertile mother, a biracial woman in an unraveling America. As she grapples with a lifetime of ambivalence about motherhood, yet another act of police brutality makes headlines, and this time the victim is Noah, a boy in her photography class. Unmoored by the grief of a recent devastating miscarriage and Noah's fight for his life, she worries she can no longer chase the hope of having a child, no longer wants to bring a Black body into the world. Yet her husband Asher - contributing white, Jewish genes alongside her Black-Japanese ones for any potential child - is just as desperate to keep trying. Throwing herself into a new documentary on motherhood, and making secret visits to Noah in the hospital, this when she learns she is, impossibly, pregnant. As the future shifts once again, she must decide yet again what she dares hope for the shape of her future to be. Fearless, timely, blazing with voice, Blue Hour is a fragmentary novel with unignorable storytelling power. Tiffany Clarke Harrison writes about your feelings. The ones that feel good, the ones that don't, and definitely the ones you don't want anyone to know. Writing novels has always been the goal, and Blue Hour is her debut. She graduated from Salisbury University with a BA in English, Creative Writing concentration, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Queens University of Charlotte. Writing is a whole-body experience, and her intuitive writing process has helped shape the raw honesty of her stories, and the stories of other authors she's coached. Tiffany lives with her husband and two children in North Carolina.
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Published 2023-04-04 by Soft Skull

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An exquisite melancholic portrait of motherhood and marriage for a biracial woman in America. Tiffany Clarke Harrison writes about miscarriage with fleshy, beating rawness leaving us painfully undone, and beautifully seen. BLUE HOUR has captured the dark question of modern motherhood amid police brutality and racism in America - do we really want to bring kids into this? There is no other book I'd rather read, than hers... I never want to love or lose again without it.

Harrison's writing is unflinching throughout, but the depictions of miscarriage and infertility - and their effect on a marriage - are particularly haunting.A poetic novel that dances on the edge of hope and despair.

In lyrical language, Harrison skillfully explores the complex tensions that gnaw at the expectant mother... and offers an intimate view of the couple's pain. This signals the arrival of a brave new writer.

The intimacy of the narration paired with Harrison's lyrical prose gives it a startling immediacy - everything feels like it's happening all at once. It's an urgent, heartbreaking, and profound meditation on motherhood, art-making, uncertainty, the ongoing violence of American racism and police brutality, and the courage it takes to choose the future.