Wandering Stars

heritable . . . The reader can see what the characters cannot what forced migration and residential schools have prevented them from seeing and sharing. The reader can see how the addictions and terrors, as well as the capacity for pleasure and endurance, echo across the Red Feather family." The New Yorker

In Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange finds different pockets, not just to flex, but to really get to beyond the marrow of this wonderfully blistered world. The work is so varied and textured but also ruthlessly clear in what it s costing and what it s destroying. Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

If there was any doubt after his incredible debut, there should be none now: Tommy Orange is one of our most important writers. The way he weaves time and life together, demands we remember how our history shapes us. In this novel the pain and resilience of generations are summoned beautifully. A wonderous journey and a necessary reminder. Nana Kwame Adjei Brenyah, author of Chain Gang All Stars

No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange. With an all-seeing heart, he traces historical and contemporary cruelties, vagaries, salvations and solutions visited upon young Cheyenne people, who cope with the impossible. In them, Tommy finds the unnerving strength that results when a broken spirit mends itself, when a wandering star finds its place, when, in spite of everything, Native people manage to survive. Louise Erdrich, author of The Sentence

Here is something rare: a novel as generous as it is genius. The care coursing through these pages care for people, care for art, care for truth is nothing short of radical. Orange writes with a historian s attention to detail and a poet s attention to language, animating every passage with an energy that only he can conjure, transfixing and transforming. Wandering Stars is not just a book; it is a creature made of song and blood, multitudinous and infinite. This novel is alive. Tess Gunty, author of The Rabbit Hutch

In his follow up to There There, Tommy Orange s Wandering Stars is a powerful and indelible work of fiction. There is so much the reader is given: love, hate, happiness, despair, knowing, unknowing, failure, redemption, and more, all of which is to say that this is a book of life a necessary story for everyone. For the sake of knowing, of understanding, Wandering Stars blew my heart into a thousand pieces and put it all back together again. This is a masterwork that will not be forgotten, a masterwork that will forever be part of you. Morgan Talty, best selling author of Night of the Living Rez

In Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange opens us up to these big lives full of hope and triumph and love and freedom but then the world comes in, history comes in, drugs and nation and bullets and the big and small lonelinesses come in. Richard Pryor said he wanted to get you laughing so your mouth would be open when he poured the poison down, and that's what Orange is doing here. Anyone can say a complicated thing in a complicated way, but Tommy says the hardest things plain beyond artifice, beyond confection. That clarity, that radical lucidity, that s the mark of true genius, a word I use here without hyperbole. Think Kafka, Lispector, Borges. Wandering Stars is the kind of book that saves lives, that makes remaining in the world feel a little more possible. It s art of the highest order, written by one of our language s most significant and urgent practitioners. Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

"I don't know how many lives Tommy Orange has lived in this one to be able to do what he does so well, but Wandering Stars is a masterwork and an example of craft meeting storytelling excellence. If you loved Susan Power's The Grass Dancer and Michelle Good's Five Little Indians, if you love the writing of Lee Maracle, katherena vermette, Louise Erdrich, Cherie Demaline, Eden Robinson, Craig Lesley, Morgan Talty and James Welch, you are going to hold this novel to your heart because this is that magnificent. Bravo, Tommy Orange. Stand proud with what you've accomplished here. Wow!" Richard Van Camp, author of The Moon of Letting Go

A stirring portrait of the fractured but resilient Bear Shield-Red Feather family in the wake of the Oakland powwow shooting that closed out the previous book . . . With incandescent prose and precise insights, Orange mines the gaps in his characters memories and finds meaning in the stories of their lives. This devastating narrative confirms Orange s essential place in the canon of Native American literature. Publishers Weekly (starred review)


A searing study of the consequences of a genocide . . . Orange is gifted at elevating his characters without romanticizing them, and though the cast is smaller than in There There, the sense of history is deeper. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Tender yet eviscerating . . . There is so much life in this mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic novel . . . Orange's second novel is both prequel and sequel to the striking There, There and a centuries-spanning novel that stands firmly on its own. Booklist (starred review)