“You're my star, a stargazer too, and I wish that I were Heaven, with a billion eyes to look at you!”
-Plato

Former research physicist Helen Sedgwick's The Comet Seekers* will transport readers to the magical world she creates as her protagonists grapple with the big issues of love, family, freedom, and loneliness. See a recent New York Times review.

Róisín, an Irish scientist and François, a French chef, meet at a research base in the frigid wilds of Antarctica in 2017, there to observe a comet. More than their expressed purpose, they both suffered devastating loss and share an indelible bond that stretches back centuries.

"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 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." (Publishers Weekly)

Reminiscent of the works of Amy Bloom and Elizabeth Strout (Booklist) for their intimate stories of family drama; its setting and story line will appeal to fans of Midge Raymond's My Last Continent.

In The Blind Astronomer's Daughter * by John Pipkin, Caroline Ainsworth, accidental stargazer, is grief-stricken when her astronomer father Arthur, throws himself from his rooftop observatory. Having gone blind from decades of staring at the sun and driven mad by unremitting jealousy of William Herschel's discovery of Uranus, Arthur has chosen death.

Unable to remain in Ireland, Caroline heads to London, and reluctantly resumes her father's work, aided only by Arthur's cryptic atlas that might hold the secret to finding a new world at the edge of the sky; while leaving behind Finnegan O'Siodha, an extraordinary telescope-maker and the love of her life.

"This lyrical, philosophical book both frustrates and delights. Its focus on discovery is similar to that in Michael Byers’ Percival’s Planet, and Pipkin’s poetic language will remind readers of Dava Sobel’s essay collection, The Planets (2005). Herschel’s story is also fictionalized in Carrie Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister (2016). (Booklist)

* = starred review