A mystery linking Manhattan circa 1991 to northeastern 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 working-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 mid-life journey to find her.

Anchored by an uninvited voyage into an extraordinary place, with a love story at its core, Blue Hours combines the adventure and moral complexity of Lillian Hellman's Julia and Ann Patchett's State of Wonder to tell a global story at an intimate level. In its ethical provocations, Blue Hours becomes an unconventional page-turner, confronting America's role in the conflicted, interconnected world.

Daphne Kalotay is the author of Calamity and Other Stories, which was short listed for the 2005 Story Prize. Her debut novel, Russian Winter, won the 2011 Writers’ League of Texas Fiction Prize, made the long list for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, was nominated for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and has been published in twenty-three foreign editions. Her second novel, Sight Reading, was a Boston Globe bestseller, a finalist for the 2014 Paterson Fiction Prize, and winner of the 2014 New England Society Book Award in Fiction. She has received fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo.