“Blue Hour” by Tiffany Clarke Miller is a captivating journey through the complexities of human emotion and connection. Through eloquent prose and nuanced characterizations, the author navigates themes of loss, redemption, and the pursuit of truth. As readers journey through the narrative, they witness the characters’ struggles, triumphs, and moments of vulnerability, each resonating with authenticity and depth. It is a compelling read that will linger in the mind long after the final page is turned.

The unnamed narrator of Tiffany Clarke Harrison’s powerful, deeply moving Blue Hour is a photographer of mixed race whose parents and younger sister died in a car crash for which she blames herself. Her husband, Asher, passionately wants a child while she is ambivalent, her own desires overshadowed by guilt and the dangers a child of theirs would face on the streets, and when she does conceive it ends in sadness and loss. When a student on the community photography course she runs is shot, she decides to make a documentary, interviewing the mothers of children murdered because of the colour of their skin.

Harrison unfolds her brief novella in an episodic narrative flashing back and forth between past and present. Her writing is often poetically lovely, studded with vivid images that fit our narrator’s photographic eye. I found myself constantly scribbling striking quotes but hers is not a showy style, more subtly powerful underlining the narrator’s journey from intellectualising her pain to feeling and facing it. The miscarriage scenes are unflinchingly visceral - readers who have had the misfortune to lose a child or are close to someone who has might want to avoid this one. Racism and police brutality is the underpinning theme of the novel but it’s the love between our narrator and Asher, and their struggle to have a family that is to the fore. A beautifully express piece of fiction that ends in hope.

Tiffany Clarke Harrison's Blue Hour was selected by Barack Obama for his summer 2023 reading lost, which provided much spotlight to this debut novel. Due for publication here in the UK later in 2024, it is immediately clear when reading it why Obama highlighted it.

Blue Hour's unamed narrator, a gifted photographer, is in a marriage in crisis - infertile and grappling with ambivalence about motherhood. Then there is an incident of police brutality, a boy in her photography class, Noah, is the victim.

In this short novel Clarke Harrison packs in a lot: it is one of those novels designed to provoke debate - indeed the review copy I was given comes with a series of reader questions at the end to further those debates. Her writing, a mixture of stream of consciousness and 2nd person POV, is engaging and sharp. It a debut which makes me very keen to see where she goes next as a novelist.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.