Fixed Stars

In the “what-if” tradition of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham, Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Fixed Stars is an achingly personal and tenderly provocative re-imagining of the life and death of a world-famous writer.

Athens, 1998. Ted Hughes has just died and Sylvia Plath is alive. Plath, now middle-aged, has been shunted into the margins of her famous ex-husband’s legacy, and has spent the last three decades living out her days as a frustrated mother and a promising-yet-obscure writer. Jolted by Hughes’s death, Plath seizes on the chance to recalibrate her life. But while she attempts to heal the estrangement from her adult children and regain control of her interrupted literary legacy, Plath encounters another surprise—a doppelganger of her much younger self, who arrives with a warning from the past that she cannot ignore. 

How does fate intertwine with chance to create tragic and triumphant personal histories? What happens when a legacy takes on a life of its own? Poignant and boldly envisioned, Fixed Stars is driven by questions of destiny and legend, and encourages readers to consider the many paths an ambitious, multi-faceted woman like Sylvia Plath might have taken if not for her death at the age of thirty.