Blue Hour

Frank Wynne is an Irish literary translator, writer and editor. He has translated more than a hundred French and Hispanic novels by authors including Michel Houellebecq, Patrick Modiano, Javier Cercas and Virginie Despentes. Over a career spanning more than twenty-five years, his work has twice earned him the Dublin Literary Award, he has been awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize on three occasions and the Premio Valle Inclán twice. Most recently, his translation of The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild by Mathias Énard won the 2024 French-American Prize. He was the first translator to chair the jury for the International Booker Prize.

"The Blue Hour is a magnificent novel that describes ten years of civil war and terrorism with lucidity and resonant fantasy." Mario Vargas Llosa "One of the major novelists of his generation." Diario de Tarragona "The legacy of the Peruvian government's bloody war against the Maoist Sendero Luminoso guerillas in the 1980s has informed much of the country's best modern fiction, from Mario Vargas Llosa's Death in the Andes to Santiago Roncagliolo's Red April. Alonso Cueto's fine, prize-winning debut novel stands in that tradition ... The conflation of Adrian's personal trauma with his nation's dark history is beautifully, delicately done." Financial Times "The strength of the plot pivots on the lovers' ambiguous feelings for one another: the intensity of their mismatched love and hatred is perfectly drawn. Cueto evokes the myriad of emotions ... plausibly and effectively ... Cueto manages to explore that quest both imaginatively and provocatively." Times Literary Supplement "This is an intelligent novel ... there are fine scenes, especially when Adrian travels north in search of Miriam and learns something of the horrors of the war between the government troops and the terrorists." The Scotsman