" 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, author of Palaver "Afternoon Hours of a Hermit is a hilarious and heart-wrenching who-done-it where the central question is not who committed murder, but what, exactly, is dead. With exacting and crystalline prose, Patrick Cottrell deploys the visual and linguistic vocabulary of a noir to gripping effect. While sitting amidst the fog, missing women, suspicious missives, stolen cars, anonymous tip-offs and mysterious photographs of this book, my whole life stopped. While I was reading I sat straight up, at the ready, clocking the evidence that our charismatic protagonist, detective Dan Moran, offered me, waiting for the narrative pins to all drop in place clearly so that I might glimpse a seed of truth about how we all become the people that others perceive. Afternoon Hours of a Hermit is a brilliant, comedy-laden meditation on the liquid, hard-to-capture qualities of grief.

" - Rita Bullwinkel, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Headshot "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, nationally bestselling author of Exhibit "A novel of existence, the void between the self and the person that others perceive, unsolvable mysteries, avoidance and missed connections, and unbreachable disaffection. Patrick Cottrell is able to write of the deepest, most complicated kinds of experiences and psychic states in prose that is so clean, resonant, and pitch perfect, it's like listening to someone play the cello in a completely silent music hall.

Somehow it is also a virtuosic work of comedy. It is not an overstatement to say that Afternoon Hours of a Hermit is a novel of genius." - Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy.