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The Comet Seekers

A Novel

ebook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available

A timeless love story and a magical, intoxicating debut for readers of The Miniaturist and The Time Traveler's Wife.

From a remote research base in Antarctica to witch burnings in Bayeux, The Comet Seekers is a romantic, mesmerizing love story about two strangers who find themselves connected by the passing of the great comets overhead and haunted by the ancestors who bind them together.

Roisin and François are strangers—or so they think—when they meet on the frozen ice sheets of Antarctica as Comet Giacobini fractures overhead. Both are compelled to explore the world but to do so both have left family behind. As we loop back through their lives, glimpsing each of them only when a comet is visible in the skies above, we see how their paths cross as they come closer and closer to this moment.

As the story moves back through the centuries to reveal the lives of their ancestors—from an accused witch to a young woman desperately embroidering Halley's Comet onto the Bayeux Tapestry—it shows how strangers can be connected and ghosts can be real, and how the way we choose to see the world can be as tragic or as beautiful as the comets themselves.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from August 29, 2016
      Former research physicist Sedgwick mines the mysteries of the solar system and human desire to craft a haunting and wonderfully ethereal debut novel about first loves, inescapable loss, and the search for one’s place in a complicated world. When Róisín, an Irish scientist studying comets, and François, a French chef, reunite at a research base in the frigid wilds of Antarctica in 2017, the two seem virtually broken because of their respective pasts. Róisín, who followed her intergalactic studies from Ireland and France to Hawaii and New York over the course of decades, spent just as many years trying to make sense of and move beyond an illicit relationship with her cousin Liam. François arrived at the base with his own baggage: Severine, his dying mother, had insisted throughout her life that the ghosts of her ancestors are real. Sedgwick tackles a centuries-spanning interconnected narrative by placing each chapter within the context of a comet’s appearance in the sky. The sections that chronicle Severine’s conversations with her dearly departed are marked by their magical realism, but those that explore Róisín and Liam’s star-crossed romance are the standouts, both quietly moving and delicately portrayed. Uniquely structured and stylistically fascinating, the multilayered story comes full circle in a denouement that is both heartbreaking and satisfying.

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  • OverDrive Read
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Languages

  • English

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