Queen Of The Quiet Hours

In the brass-and-rosewood world of 1961 Manhattan, Vivienne Cole has just claimed the editor-in-chief chair at Éclat - the most coveted seat in American women's magazines. Eleven years of flawless ascent. Thirty-three years of a single, perfect lie.

Because Vivienne Cole was born Iris Marie Coleman - a light-skinned Black woman from a Hartford mill town who stepped off a train in 1947 and never looked back.

When a journalist from The Crisis arrives with proof of her true identity, Vivienne faces an impossible choice: protect the mask that made her success possible... or finally rewrite the magazine - and her own story - in her own name.

As she quietly commissions groundbreaking profiles of Marian Anderson, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Black mothers who engineered their daughters' futures, Vivienne discovers that the second phase of her life isn't about holding on. It's about letting the truth speak.

Lyrical, luminous, and devastatingly timely, Queen of the Quiet Hours is a debut about ambition, identity, and the women whose names were never meant to appear on the masthead. For fans of The Vanishing Half, The Personal Librarian, and the quiet power of Nella Larsen.