Hardback : $37.11
"It is a heartbreaking book, a gorgeous book...In Night Came with Many Stars, Van Booy finds the weakness, grace and beauty of common lives fully lived."
-NPR, "Books We Love"
"Not to miss!"
-USA Today
In Kentucky, back in 1933, Carol's daddy lost his 13-year-old daughter in a game of cards. Award-winning author Simon Van Booy's spellbinding novel spans decades as he tells the story of Carol and the people in her life. Incidents intersect and lives unexpectedly change course in this masterfully interwoven story of chance and choice that leads home again to a night blessed with light.
"What you give in this world," an old man tells his grandson, "will be given back to you." Those words illuminate the actions within this unforgettable novel and its connected characters. A young man survives two nearly fatal accidents. A Black family saves an orphaned white boy. A pregnant teenager is rescued by the side of the road. A teenager with developmental disabilities is given his first job. Each incident grows in meaning and power over many decades as we see connections sometimes felt but not always apparent to the people themselves. "Everything was moving," observes Samuel (Carol's grandson) in the Kentucky woods. "An invisible force that was everywhere, and made everything touch."
Told by a master storyteller, Night Came with Many Stars is a rare novel that reveals how wondrous, mysterious, and magically connected life can be-the light Simon Van Booy creates illuminates our own lives.
"It is a heartbreaking book, a gorgeous book...In Night Came with Many Stars, Van Booy finds the weakness, grace and beauty of common lives fully lived."
-NPR, "Books We Love"
"Not to miss!"
-USA Today
In Kentucky, back in 1933, Carol's daddy lost his 13-year-old daughter in a game of cards. Award-winning author Simon Van Booy's spellbinding novel spans decades as he tells the story of Carol and the people in her life. Incidents intersect and lives unexpectedly change course in this masterfully interwoven story of chance and choice that leads home again to a night blessed with light.
"What you give in this world," an old man tells his grandson, "will be given back to you." Those words illuminate the actions within this unforgettable novel and its connected characters. A young man survives two nearly fatal accidents. A Black family saves an orphaned white boy. A pregnant teenager is rescued by the side of the road. A teenager with developmental disabilities is given his first job. Each incident grows in meaning and power over many decades as we see connections sometimes felt but not always apparent to the people themselves. "Everything was moving," observes Samuel (Carol's grandson) in the Kentucky woods. "An invisible force that was everywhere, and made everything touch."
Told by a master storyteller, Night Came with Many Stars is a rare novel that reveals how wondrous, mysterious, and magically connected life can be-the light Simon Van Booy creates illuminates our own lives.
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Simon Van Booy is the award-winning, bestselling author of more than a dozen books for adults and children, including The Secret Lives of People in Love and Sipsworth. He is the anthologist of three volumes of philosophy and has written for The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, and the BBC. His books have been translated into many languages and optioned for film. Raised in rural North Wales, he currently lives in New York where he is also a book editor and a volunteer E.M.T. crew chief.
“It is a heartbreaking book, a gorgeous book...In Night Came with
Many Stars, Van Booy finds the weakness, grace and beauty of common
lives fully lived.”
—NPR, “Books We Love”
“Not to miss!”
—USA Today
“Kindness and raw luck undergird Night Came with Many Stars—echoing
the trials and windfalls of Oliver Twist or David Copperfield. And
like Dickens’s young heroes, Van Booy’s determined souls act with
their whole hearts—as does this brave, fierce novel—to earn what
good may come.”
—Boston Globe
“Van Booy is a beautiful storyteller, and his latest offering is no
exception.”
—New York Post, “Best new books”
“A beautifully realized, multigenerational family novel that is
exceptional for its memorable, fully developed characters. Readers
will become emotionally invested…invited to consider the meaning of
family and the power of memory.”
—Booklist
“A work of great warmth, generosity, and optimism. Van Booy is a
writer of grace and empathy.”
—East Hampton Star
“Simon Van Booy’s spellbinding novel is told with an exquisite and
poetic delicacy, imbued with a profound compassion for the humanity
of its characters. It is a gorgeously written, deeply moving
triumph.”
—Gabriel Byrne, Walking with Ghosts
“Night Came with Many Stars is an ensemble narrative, with stories
and perspectives spanning the 20th century. What connects them is
place, and the search for a sense of home and safety—whether that
means a car, a house, a piece of land, or another person. They are
also connected through the strength and ingenuity of girls and
women, whose stories in this novel are searing and
unforgettable.”
—Fiction Writers Review
“I read this novel in a headlong rush, unable to break free of its
spell. Beautiful as an old bruise, plain-spoken as a prayer, Night
Came with Many Stars rings hard and true with the poetry of real
life. Van Booy knows that love and heartache go hand-in-hand—and
that cold hard reality is no match for the dreams and longings each
of us carry inside.”
—Christina Baker Kline, author of The Orphan Train
“This beautiful novel left me with a heightened appreciation of the
pattern created by each individual life, as well as the larger
pattern of several lives overlapping. Night Came with Many Stars is
about impermanence and resilience, and the marvelous randomness of
the world.”
—Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither
“Simon Van Booy’s Night Came With Many Stars is an ambitious and
deeply humane novel about the lives of an American family across
multiple generations. Not since Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff and
Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son has middle America been so powerfully
evoked and brilliantly animated. This is a monumental novel that
brings something new and resonant to the classic American
multi-generational family novel.”
—Chigozie Obioma, author of The Fisherman
“I have long loved the work of Simon Van Booy, and this spare,
gorgeously-written novel may be his best yet. These unforgettable
characters and the intersection of their destinies through time
form a pattern as true and human and beautiful as life itself.”
—Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance
“A breathtaking talent and an artist in the fullest sense of the
word, few writers sculpt their sentences with such beautiful
precision, and fewer still imbue their characters with such depth
of humanity. Night Came with Many Stars is a triumph, possibly his
best work yet, a devastating, heartbreaking, and deeply truthful
novel that will keep its hooks in the reader long beyond the final
page. A stunning achievement.”
—Billy O’Callaghan, author of Life Sentences
“Cycles of racism, violence, and misogyny are disrupted by the
grace-filled actions of friends, relatives, and strangers...This
well-crafted and often serendipitous saga recognizes that family
cannot be escaped but can be expanded.”
—Kirkus
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