'The Blue Hour' by Paula Hawkins is our 'GMA' Book Club pick for November
The novel explores themes of ambition, legacy and betrayal.
''The Blue Hour'' by New York Times bestselling author Paula Hawkins is our "GMA" Book Club pick for November.
Hawkins' new novel delves into themes of ambition, legacy and betrayal. Set on a remote Scottish island, isolated from the mainland "for twelve hours each day," according to a synopsis, a present-day discovery connects the lives of three people, unraveling a tangled web of secrets and deception.
"A masterful and propulsive novel that asks searing questions of ambition, power, gender and perception, '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," a press release states.
"Through brilliant plot twists and alternating perspectives, Hawkins challenges our assumptions and expectations of all three of her main characters, and explores the effects of isolation with an evocative and haunting sense of place," the press release continues.
Read an excerpt below and get a copy of the book here.
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This month, we are also teaming up with Little Free Library to give out free copies in Times Square and at 150 locations across the U.S. and Canada. Since 2009, more than 300 million books have been shared in Little Free Libraries across the world. Click here to find a copy of ''The Blue Hour'' at a Little Free Library location near you.
Read along with us and join the conversation all month on our Instagram account, @GMABookClub, and with #GMABookClub.
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In the chastening chill of a dazzling October morning, James Becker stands on a footbridge, hip hitched against the handrail, rolling a cigarette.
Beneath him, the stream runs black and slow, the water close to freezing, oozing like treacle over rusty orange stone.
This is the mid-point of his daily commute, which takes a full twelve minutes from the Gamekeeper's Lodge, where he lives, to Fairburn House, where he works. Fifteen minutes if he stops for a smoke.
Coat collar up, glancing quickly over one shoulder, he might appear furtive to an outsider, though he's no need to be.
He belongs here, astonishing as that may be; even he can barely credit it. How can he -- fatherless bastard of a supermarket checkout girl, state-school boy in a cheap suit -- be living and working here, at Fairburn, among the blue bloods?
He doesn't fit. And yet somehow, through hard work and dumb luck and only a minor bit of treachery, here he is.
He lights his cigarette and checks over his shoulder one more time, looking back at the lodge, warm light spilling from the kitchen window, turning the beech hedge golden.
No one is watching him -- Helena will still be in bed, pillow clamped between her knees -- no one will see him breaking the promise he made to quit.
He has cut down -- to just three a day now -- and by the time the water freezes, he thinks, he'll pack them in altogether.
Leaning back on the rail, he draws hard on his cigarette, looking up at the hills to the north, their peaks already dusted with snow.
Somewhere between here and there a siren wails; Becker thinks he glimpses a flash of blue light on the road, an ambulance or a police car.
His blood rushes and his head swims with nicotine; in his stomach he feels the faint but undeniable tug of fear.
Smoking quickly, as though it might do less damage that way, he flicks the dog end over the rail and into the water. He crosses the bridge and crunches his way across the frosted lawn toward the house.
The landline in his office is ringing when he opens the door.
"'Lo?" Becker jams the handset between his shoulder and chin, turns on his computer, and pivots, reaching across to flick the switch on the coffee maker on the side table.
There's a pause before a clear, clipped voice says, "Good morning. Am I speaking with James Becker?"
"You are." Becker types in his password, shrugs off his coat. "Right, well." Another pause. "This is Goodwin, Tate Modern."
The phone slips from Becker's shoulder; he catches it and presses it to his ear once more. "Sorry, who?"
The man on the other end of the phone exhales audibly. "Will Goodwin," he says, his cut-glass vowels exaggerated by enunciation. "From Tate Modern in London. I'm calling because we have a problem with one of the pieces on loan from Fairburn."
Becker stands to attention, his fist tightening around the handset. "Oh, Christ, you haven't damaged it, have you?"
"No, Mr. Becker." Goodwin's tone drips restraint. "We have taken perfectly good care of all three of Fairburn's pieces. However, we have had cause to withdraw one of the sculptures, Division II, from the exhibition."
Becker frowns, sitting down. "What do you mean?"
"According to an email we received from a very distinguished forensic anthropologist who visited our exhibition this weekend, Division II includes a human bone."
Becker's burst of laughter is met with bottomless silence. "I'm sorry," Becker says, still chuckling, "but that is just -- "
"Well might you apologize!" Goodwin sounds murderous.
"I'm afraid I do not share your amusement. Thanks entirely to your curatorial incompetence, in my very first exhibition as director and the museum's very first post-pandemic show, we find ourselves in the position of having inadvertently displayed human remains. Do you have any idea how damaging this could be for us as an institution? It's this sort of thing that gets people canceled."
When finally Becker gets off the phone he stares at the computer screen in front of him, waiting for Goodwin to forward him the email. This complaint -- if you can call it that -- is obvious nonsense. A joke, perhaps? Or possibly a genuine mistake?
The message appears at the top of his inbox, and Becker clicks.
He reads the message twice, Googles its sender (a well-respected academic at a major British university -- an unlikely joker), and then clicks on ArtPro, Fairburn's cataloging software, to search for the piece in question.
There it is. Division II, circa 2005, by Vanessa Chapman. Color photographs, taken by Becker himself, illustrate the listing.
Ceramic, wood, and bone, suspended by filament, float around each other in a glass case fashioned by Chapman herself.
The ceramic and bone are identical twins: fragile spindles of pure white, fractured at their centers and bonded together with lacquer and gold.
The first time he saw it, he thought it must have been sent by mistake.
Sculpture? Vanessa Chapman wasn't a sculptor; she was a painter, a ceramicist. But there it was, beautiful and strange, a delicate enigma, the perfect puzzle.
No explanatory note, only the briefest mention in a notebook, where Chapman talked about the difficulties she'd had putting together its skin, the glass box encasing the other components.
Indubitably hers then, and now his. His to research, to catalog, to describe and display, to introduce to the world.
It was shown, briefly, at Fairburn House and since then has been viewed by thousands of people -- tens of thousands! -- on loan at galleries in Berlin and Paris and, most recently, London.
A human bone! It's absurd. Pushing his chair back from his desk, Becker gets to his feet, turning to face the window.
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From "The Blue Hour" by Paula Hawkins. Reprinted courtesy of Mariner Books/HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2024 by Paula Hawkins.
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