Barney Norris

Barney Norris works across novels, plays, and theatre direction, often attending to memory, place, and lives that appear ordinary from the outside. The Vanishing Hours brings together two strangers carrying histories of love, abandonment, and loss, allowing their stories to emerge through a quiet encounter instead of a conventional dramatic revelation. Penguin’s edition page identifies Black Swan as the publisher and frames the novel around the stories people tell in order to survive what has happened to them. Faber’s author profile places Norris’s fiction alongside his stage work and records his role in founding the theatre company Up in Arms. That theatrical background is relevant to the novel’s careful handling of voice, withheld information, and the emotional pressure of conversation. The Vanishing Hours therefore fits his recurring concern with how people narrate experience after certainty has disappeared. Norris gives attention to pauses and partial recollection, inviting readers to notice what his characters cannot easily say as much as what they disclose.