Celestial Lights - by Cecile Pin (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A coming-of-age tale set on Earth and in space, Celestial Lights is perfect for fans of Orbital and Normal People.

January 28, 1986: soon after launch the Challenger shuttle falls out of the sky and into the sea. At the same time, Oliver Ines, the most renowned astronaut of his time, is born. Celestial Lights is his story.

His idyllic, if lonely, childhood is spent in a small English village, where he falls in love with Philly, his neighbour's niece. During his college years in London and a stint in the Navy, his fascination with the celestial sharpens into a focus often mistaken for aloofness. When the enterprising and elusive billionaire Mark Massey taps him to train as an astronaut and lead a mission to Europa, Oliver must make a choice that will send his whole world spinning.

He is accompanied on his journey by only three crew members who must learn to depend on each other. Unreachable by anyone on Earth, Oliver details the voyage in a private log, mourning the life he has left behind, and dreaming of a future that only he can bring about.

Celestial Lights is a portrait of a complicated man whose unparalleled understanding of the universe doesn't always translate into stellar relationships on Earth. It explores the sacrifices required to achieve greatness--but more importantly, the idea that greatness is not always what it seems. A breathtaking tale of memory, personal choices, and the relationships that define us, Celestial Lights will make every reader marvel at the night sky while cherishing the connections that make our planet home.

Review Quotes

Past Praise for Cecile Pin

"Wandering Souls is more than a story of sacrifice and familial duty. The author has greater ambitions, first signaled in the intricate story structure she builds. . . . What emerges is something special--a polyvocal novel, an essay on inherited trauma and a quiet metafiction about telling stories we don't own."
--Eric Nguyen, New York Times Book Review

"Wandering Souls is immersive, creative and deeply emotional."
--Good Morning America

"The work of mothering often falls to those who are not mothers in the biological sense--a circumstance that's elegantly explored in Cecile Pin's Wandering Souls. . . . With compassion and clarity, Pin describes the ways a family cares for one another in the wake of life-altering tragedy."
--Time, "8 New Books to Read or Give This Mother's Day"

"Pin movingly explores how their lives are shaped--and warped--by larger historical forces, and then how these lost souls struggle to move through denial and into some tentative form of acceptance."
--Los Angeles Times

"Pin's prose is quietly powerful, her voice assured, her love for this fictional family apparent on every page."
--Star Tribune

About the Author

Cecile Pin grew up in Paris and New York City. She moved to London at eighteen to study philosophy at University College London and received an MA at King's College London. She is a 2021 London Writers Award winner. Wandering Souls, her first novel, was long-listed for the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal, and the Prix Femina étranger.