Blue Hours

Kalotay’s latest (after Sight Reading) is a sharp portrait of an isolated woman seeking to understand a defining relationship of her past. Jumping from the Manhattan of the early 1990s to northeastern Afghanistan in the early 2010s, the novel centers on the friendship between Mim and Kyra, two young women from vastly different backgrounds. Mim, who later becomes a celebrated novelist, and Kyra, who leaves behind her upper-crust upbringing to work in humanitarian aid abroad, meet each other just after college, and end up sharing a room in Manhattan. Their closeness is entirely new to Mim, the novel’s narrator, until a mutual loss forges a wall between them and they dramatically part ways. Twenty years later, Mim is presented with a stack of letters from Kyra and informed that she has gone missing from her NGO post abroad. Accompanied by Kyra’s ex-husband, and leaving behind her own family, Mim sets off to Afghanistan to find Kyra. This ambitious novel is most successful in its early pages, particularly when Mim focuses on class differences between herself and the friends and lovers she pursues. But Mim’s first-person recollections, and her quest across dangerous terrain abroad, are told so impassively as to feel almost cold-blooded. Still, the novel successfully raises important questions about decisions made on both intimate and global levels, and their consequences. [em](July) [/em]