Blue Hours

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 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 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