The Stars We Share
A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
“Dazzles from start to finish.” —Georgia Hunter, New York Times bestselling author of We Were the Lucky Ones
Set against the backdrop of World War II, a sweeping, atmospheric novel of sacrifice, ambition, and commitment, and the secrets we keep from the ones we love
It's 1927 when Alec and June meet as children in a tranquil English village. Alec, an orphan, anchors himself in the night sky and longs for adventures. June memorizes maps and railway timetables, imagining a future bright with possibilities.
As the years pass, their loves feels inevitable, but soon the Second World War separates them. Alec enlists as a Royal Air Force pilot flying daredevil fighter sorties at night; June finds her calling as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, covert work that will mean keeping her contribution to the war effort a secret from Alec forever. Each is following a dream—but those dreams force them apart for years at a time.
Their postwar reunion is bittersweet: Alec, shot down and imprisoned in a series of POW camps, grapples with his injuries and the loss of his RAF career. June, on the other hand, has found her vocation and struggles to follow the expected path to domesticity, as much as she loves Alec. But Alec wants nothing more than to make a life and a family together.
With the war behind them, their scars—both visible and unseen—make them strangers to each other. Now each must decide how much to reveal to the other, which dreams can be sacrificed, and which secrets are too big to bear alone.
Spanning forty years and shifting from bustling Indian ports to vibrant gardens in Edinburgh to a horse farm in Kenya, The Stars We Share is a poignant, heart-wrenching novel about the decisions and concessions that make a life and a love worth having.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Posey impresses in his moving debut, a sprawling account of the evolving relationship between two people who first met as children. After eight-year-old Alec Oswin's parents die in 1927, his uncle takes him from India, where Alec was born, to start a new life in an English village. There, he meets June Attwell, who befriends him. They fall in love at 18, but WWII interferes. Alec becomes a fighter pilot with the RAF and is shot down, becoming a German POW, while June lends her intellect to the war effort as a Bletchley Park code breaker. When they finally reunite in 1946, Alec worries he's been so transformed by his experiences that he's no longer deserving of June. The prose sometimes strains a bit ("the letter is too short, a sparrow when he would have liked to send a goshawk"), but overall, Posey displays gifts for crafting realistic dialogue and bringing people and places to life. Though this isn't at the rarefied level of All the Light We Cannot See, fans of that book are likely to be engrossed.
