NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of There There (The New York Times Book Review) delivers a masterful sequel to his classic debut novel. Tommy Orange expands his narrative constellation to include the past and the future, tracing the legacies of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School across three generations of one family in a story that is both devastating and wondrous.
“Knowing and understanding Wandering Stars blew my heart into a thousand pieces and put it all back together again. This is a masterpiece that will not be forgotten, a masterpiece that will always be a part of you.”– Morgan Talty, author of the bestselling Night of the Living Rez
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is taken to the prison castle of Fort Marion, where he is forced to learn and practice English . Christianity. Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to eradicating Native history, culture and identity. A generation later, Star's son Charles is sent to school, where he is abused by the man who was once his father's prison guard. Under Pratt's harsh treatment, Charles clings to the moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two imagine a future away from the institutional violence that follows their lineages.
In a novel as devastating as it is wonderful, Tommy Orange has brought to life the ancestors of the family that readers first fell in love with in There There (Warriors, Drunks, Outlaws, Addicts) by asking them what it means being children and grandchildren of their massacre.A novel of epigenetic and generational trauma with the power and insight of a modern epic, Wandering Stars is an exceptionally powerful new book from one of today's most exciting authors, and a dizzying affirmation of Tommy's monumental gifts. Orange.
