The Stars are Fire

Author(s): Anita Shreve

Fiction

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLERWashington Post 50 Notable Works of Fiction 2017
 
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Weight of Water and The Pilot's Wife (an Oprah's Book Club selection): an exquisitely suspenseful new novel about an extraordinary young woman tested by a catastrophic event--based on the true story of the largest fire in Maine's history
 
In October 1947, Grace Holland is experiencing two simultaneous droughts. An unseasonably hot, dry summer has turned the state of Maine into a tinderbox, and Grace and her husband, Gene, have fallen out of love and barely speak. Five months pregnant and caring for two toddlers, Grace has resigned herself to a life of loneliness and domestic chores. One night she awakes to find that wildfires are racing down the coast, closer and closer to her house. Forced to pull her children into the ocean to escape the flames, Grace watches helplessly as everything she knows burns to the ground. By morning, her life is forever changed: she is homeless, penniless, awaiting news of her husband's fate, and left to face an uncertain future in a town that no longer exists. With courage and stoicism, Grace overcomes devastating loss and, through the smoke, is able to glimpse the opportunity to rewrite her own story.

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A compulsive read, this novel pulled me into an ordinary woman's life and made me care too much about her to put it down * Glasgow Herald * Precise, evocative prose brings the story's vivid characters to life...original and gripping * People * An elegant portrait of a gutsy woman bent on survival * Woman & Home * Delicate, poignant storytelling * Good Housekeeping * Like her sensational best-selling 1998 novel The Pilot's Wife, about a widow who discovers her pilot husband had a second family, The Stars Are Fire explores what happens in the secret spaces between married people...Masterful... lingers long after the last page is turned, like the smoke from a wildfire * USA Today * Shreve's account of the fires is terrifying, and her portrait of a bad marriage almost equally so. Her recreation of post-war, pre feminist American society is a model of elegant restraint, deep feeling, skillful characterisation, and a richly evocative sense of place * Sydney Morning Herald * Long before Liane Moriarty was spinning her Big Little Lies, Shreve was spicing up domestic doings in beachfront settings with terrible husbands and third-act twists. She still is, as effectively as ever, this time with a narrative literally lit from within * New York Times * Anita Shreve...writes with such care and knowing that it's impossible not to be consumed by her storytelling, her beautiful sentences always exceeding the sum of their words . . . Shreve is a literary talent for all, and this novel - up there with her award-winning The Weight of Water - is flaming good * The Times *

Anita Shreve is the acclaimed author of seventeen novels, including Rescue, A Change in Altitude, Testimony, andThe Pilot's Wife, which was a selection of Oprah's Book Club. She lives in Massachusetts.

General Fields

  • : 9780349123585
  • : Little, Brown Book Group Limited
  • : Abacus
  • : 0.252
  • : April 2018
  • : 203mm X 142mm X 23mm
  • : April 2018
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Anita Shreve
  • : Paperback
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : English
  • : 813.6
  • : 813.6
  • : 320
  • : 320
  • : FA
  • : FA