The Ember Hours: A Slow-Burn Contemporary Romance

In the foggy coastal town of Mariner's Light, Washington, Sable Kerrigan hasn't slept through the night in five years. She makes her living as a sleep consultant, recording voice memos at three in the morning for strangers who cannot sleep—a career built on the wreckage of a fiancé who left her two weeks before their wedding and a wall she constructed to make sure no one could ever get close enough to leave again.

August Reed is a novelist whose third book is fourteen months overdue. His wife has left him. His editor is losing patience. He has not written a sentence in five months. He has also stopped sleeping. His publisher's solution: hire a sleep consultant who will not look at him, who will only send voice memos through an app, and whose low, unhurried voice becomes the one thing capable of interrupting the small, circular thinking that has consumed his nights.

What neither of them knows is that August has been quietly memorizing the poems Sable publishes anonymously under the initials S.K. in a small literary journal. What Sable does not know is that the man sending her voice memos at three in the morning is the same man who has been reading her poems aloud to himself in the dark, keeping himself alive through her words without ever knowing they were hers.

As autumn deepens into winter along the Olympic Peninsula, the voice memos become a country with its own weather. A country built in the dark, in the fog, in the slow count of a buoy marking the channel. A country where two people who have stopped trusting the part of themselves that wants learn, slowly, carefully, to want again.

The Ember Hours is a luminous, emotionally authentic contemporary romance about grief and resurrection, about the walls we build to protect ourselves and the courage required to let them come down. It is a slow-burn love story for readers who believe that the most intimate thing two people can do is not to touch, but to attend—to listen, to be present, to stay awake with each other in the dark until the dark becomes a place worth living in.

Perfect for readers of Maggie O'Farrell, Anne Patchett, and Maria Duenas, The Ember Hours is a novel for anyone who has ever been awake at three in the morning, waiting for the dark to become something else.