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.