The Setup Hour

About this book

A school cello breaks before the spring concert, and a string teacher drives it across the Hudson to a luthier who turns her down. She returns with coffee. A slow-burn small-town romance about grief, caring for family and the patience of craft.

Aoife Brogan teaches strings at Beacon Middle School and is her younger sister’s primary caregiver. At four in the morning before the spring showcase, her student drops the program’s loaner cello on the loading-dock stairs. Aoife drives the broken instrument across the Hudson to the only luthier on the school’s vendor list — Renard Marbreau, who has not taken on a school instrument in eight years and four months and who has a cello in the corner of his workshop covered with a cloth no one has lifted since his brother died.

He says no. She comes back at five with two coffees from the Pantry. He works through the day.

The Setup Hour is a quietly written, slow-burn contemporary romance set in the Hudson Valley — the story of a grumpy luthier and the sunshine viola teacher who hands him a clamp at his workbench every Tuesday afternoon for six months. It is a book about grief that cohabits with new love, about caregiving as identity and caregiving as choice, about craft as a slow form of repair, and about the difference between letting go and being abandoned. It is also a book about a Vienna conservatory residency that arrives in the wrong month, a sister’s hospitalization that arrives in the wrong week, a half-finished cello that has been waiting eight years to be finished, and the small everyday rituals of arrival that turn a workshop into a life.

Warm heat-level. Happily Ever After delivered as continuous-present routine. For readers of Lori Ostlund’s *After the Parade*, Ann Patchett’s *Bel Canto*, and Helen Hoang’s *The Heart Principle*.

Grumpy x Sunshine. Forced proximity. Slow burn. Found family. Disability representation. Dual POV.