Afternoon Hours of a Hermit by Patrick Cottrell

When Korean adoptee Dan Moran receives a photo of his deceased brother in the mail, the mysterious letter – addressed to his deadname – drags him back to Milwaukee’s airless suburbs. There, armed with an eye for inquiry and his favourite existential turtleneck, Dan navigates estrangement and mistaken identity, urgently trying to decode the three names his brother left scrawled in marker on his fingertips. The much-anticipated second novel from Patrick Cottrell, Afternoon Hours of a Hermit is a heartbreaking and Bernhardian investigation into memory, identity, and the act of writing itself.
 
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'While reading Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, I was rapt, jolted, thrilled, and astonished. I lost count of how often I laughed. I have fallen irrevocably in love with this novel; I want to write it a song. Read this exhilarating book if you want to feel more alive.’ - R. O. Kwon
 
‘Afternoon Hours of a Hermit is prescient and captivating, hilarious and horrifying. A book that enchants and entices and enrages is a rare thing; Patrick Cottrell has once again solidified his prose as knowing, and generous, and vicious, and tender. Afternoon Hours of a Hermit is a book very much in love with the world — attuned to its horrors and wonders — a novel I will return to again and again.’ - Bryan Washington