The Blue Hour (Hardcover)

Welcome to Eris: a tidal island with only one house, one inhabitant, one way out. Unreachable from the Scottish mainland for twelve hours each day.

It's been five years since the death of Vanessa Chapman, the celebrated expressionist painter who made her home on Eris. Vanessa was infamous for being aloof and mysterious – particularly after her notoriously unfaithful husband Julian disappeared. When a human bone is uncovered in one of Vanessa's artworks, far away in London, an unlikely team forms between Becker, the eager curator of her first posthumous exhibition and Grace, the reluctant and reclusive executor of her will. On the rocky shores of Eris, the two grapple with what Vanessa left behind – not only artworks, but questions: Where does private life end and reputation begin? Who is entitled to an artist's most personal works and records? And what really happened to Julian Chapman all those years ago?

A masterful and propulsive novel that asks searing questions of ambition, freedom, gender, and legacy, The Blue Hour recalls the very best of Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith and cements Hawkins’s place among the very best of our most nuanced, powerful, and stylish storytellers.