August 15, 2025

Blue Hours, by Alison Acheson

I really enjoyed Alison Acheson’s moody atmospheric novel Blue Hours, a story about fatherhood, and widowerhood, and what it means (and what it takes) to keep going. It’s also the story of a marriage, Keith and Raziel’s, through which they’d both aspired to defy convention. She was the breadwinner, a successful photographer, and he was the caretaker, a stay-at-home dad to their son Charlie. All the ways in which Raziel wasn’t like anybody else were part of what Keith loved best about her, but when he begins to sort through her things after her death, he discovers there were parts of Raziel’s life that he never knew about, he starts to wonder if he ever really knew her at all. All the while their 7-year-old son is processing his own grief, and Keith has to stay attentive to that, his son’s mind a mystery as great as his wife’s had been. And grief is its own kind of terrain, something Acheson knows about from her own experience—she’s author of a memoir about her husband’s death from ALS. Time marches on, and Keith needs to find a way for him and his son to go with it, and Blue Hours is a novel about enduring, artfully and evocatively wrought.