🦋🌫️🍋🟩The Indigo Hours…forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books
In 2018, I wrote a novella about erratic romance/Romance and the lyrical space-times of its (im)possibility. The fictional ~situationship at the heart of this work is stretched into, over and through various places — real and imagined — which the narrator digs into as pockets of presence and meaning. With its wandering, non-linear plot, I’d describe The Indigo Hours as ambient fiction. It’s a little eclipse of a book. It was ambiently written (leisurely, over one summer, as a dare) and may invite ambient reading. Which is to say, a textual experience more inclined to ‘going round’ a thing, attuning to its surrounds, getting lost, adjusting the frequency of (dis)interest. This is like dating a semi-transparent person. To adore the ghosts of both of you. How might love halo or envelope one’s personhood? How might love’s presence be felt ambiently in the objects and subjects of everyday life? The work tests love against memory, song, travel and friendship. I was interested in the phenomenon of blue — specifically indigo — as a desiring filter. Indigo as a singularity. Indigo as language of variable opacity. Denim wash (to go someplace). The supernatural inflection of indigo children (as a vocalised attempt at performing divergence of attention, durée and feeling). The book is full of aura, fleeting connections, music, art, intimacy and loss. It will be out on Hallowe’en, 31st October 2025.
Some nice things people have said:
The Indigo Hours’ lyrical prose, daubed from a free-associating palette of sensory psychedelia, becomes a portal into a ‘blossomy blossomy realm of the possible,’ where sadness is a sexuality, jealousies cause for celebration, and love a drunken texture. Painterly, tender, and spatially generous, this affecting novella rewards re-reading, like a magic eye that reveals a new image, and perhaps new self, with every glance.
— Poppy Cockburn
The Indigo Hours is watery fortification. Beneath li’l triads of asterisk constellations, Maria Sledmere tells a post-Romantic tale of moonlit precarity and passion among pools & thunderstorms & prairies & airports, where feeling wretched wandering midnight miles is a complex freedom, as exposure on cobalt-lit webcams, dozing/dosing to dub deep trap techno, bruises so Blühen. Yet under cosmic circumstances that augur heartbreak, Maria gifts us the deep assurance of ancient-blue auras and a languageful love pulsing constant. For insomniacs-or-otherwise against analgesia’s ‘“who cares”’, a most vital and tender-prone tonic.
— Amy Grandvoinet
Preorder now from the publisher.
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