Wandering Stars
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024
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Beschreibung des Verlags
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
'Wandering Stars is the kind of book that saves lives' Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
'Among the tragedy .... there is redemption and humanity. It's a stunning book' Dua Lipa, Service95 Book of the Month
A heart-rending story of a Native American community told through the generations
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by an evangelical prison guard, who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial school, dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture and identity.
Years later, Star's son, Charles, is sent to this school, where he is brutalised by the same man. Together with fellow student Opal Viola, Charles envisions a future far away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.
Full of poetry music, rage and love, Wandering Stars, looks to the past and future across the generations of the Bear Shield and Red Feather family, finding their way through displacement and pain, towards home and hope.
A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024
AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024
'Wondrous' Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars
'This novel is alive' Tess Gunty, author of The Rabbit Hutch
'A towering achievement’ New York Times
'As vital as air' Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Orange follows up his PEN/Hemingway-winning There There with 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. The sequel is wider in scope, beginning with stories of the family's ancestors before catching up to the present. Those ancestors include Jude Star, who barely survives the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in what is now Colorado as a youth and is sent to a prison in St. Augustine, Fla., where he's forced to learn English and read the Bible. Jude later works as a farmhand in Oklahoma and raises his son Charles, who is sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. As a young man in the early 1900s, Charles drifts into San Francisco, where he becomes addicted to morphine while contending with the trauma of forced assimilation and unspecified abuse at Carlisle ("There is something deeper down, doing its dark work on him some further forgotten thing, but what is it? His life is about knowing it is there but not ever wanting to see it"). In the present, high school freshman Orvil Red Feather recovers at home in Oakland after being struck by a stray bullet during the powwow. Like Charles, he becomes addicted to opiates and struggles to connect with his cultural identity after his grandmother neglects to share details about their Cheyenne heritage. 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.
