The Hour of Revelation

The French writer and philosopher Muriel Barbery became a star after the publication of her second novel "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" (2006) — it sold over two million copies in France alone, brought the author about a dozen prestigious literary awards, was translated into more than forty languages, and since then each of Barbery's books has only confirmed her status as the queen of bestsellers.
Her new novel "The Hour of Revelation" and the previous one, "Only Rose," form a substantial picture, an unclosed story, whose characters live their undeniably interconnected lives, without meeting each other in time or space. In the novel "Only Rose," a forty-year-old woman comes to Japan to find the roots lost since birth and to understand her unknown deceased father, who remains off-screen throughout the novel; only Rose is on screen. In "The Hour of Revelation," she remains off-screen, while the main character, Rose's father, Haru Ueno, a collector and dealer of contemporary Japanese art, is on screen, whose irresistible love for beauty granted him a keen eye for the beautiful from a young age and drove him away from the countryside to Kyoto. "The Hour of Revelation" is a poetic, moving, and profound story of Haru, his friends (artists by profession or in their hearts), his love for his daughter — a distance love, delicate and unyielding — and his gradual, inescapable self-discovery. Set against the backdrop of Japan, where the author lived for several years — a country that is unfathomable and endlessly alluring — a quiet and poignant drama unfolds: in it, beauty lies in the tiniest details, melancholy is inseparable from the joy of life, and death and birth are one and the same.
For the first time in Russian!