The Indigo Hours by Maria Sledmere is an immersive, radiant text that moves between autofiction, essay, and poetic prose to document the textures of contemporary longing. Centred around a seasonal arc and filtered through the ambient melancholia of late capitalism, the work refracts emotional experience through media, memory, pop culture, and shifting landscapes—from Berlin pools to prairie towns, from night buses to art galleries. Sledmere’s sentences are lush, recursive, and sensorily attuned, sustaining a rhythmic, diaristic lyricism that continually folds the personal into the atmospheric. What emerges is a powerful reckoning with intimacy, grief, and temporality at the edges of digital and embodied life.

PRAISE for The Indigo Hours:

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

ABOUT Maria Sledmere:

Maria Sledmere is a poet, editor and scholar living in Glasgow. Her most recent publications are Languishing, cute — with Ian Macartney (Tapsalteerie, 2025), Midsummer Song (Tenement Press, 2024) and Cinders (Krupskaya, 2024). She is senior lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde, managing editor of SPAM Press and one half of the performance duo Project Somnolence.