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.