The heart-rending story of a Native American community told through the generations, longlisted for the Booker Prize
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by an evangelical prison guard, who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial school, dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture and identity.
Years later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to this school, where he is brutalised by the same man. Together with fellow student Opal Viola, Charles envisions a future far away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.
Full of poetry music, rage and love, Wandering Stars, looks to the past and future across the generations of the Bear Shield and Red Feather family, finding their way through displacement and pain, towards home and hope.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 336
Imprint: Vintage UK
Publication date: 10/06/2025
Wandering Stars
by Tommy Orange
Review by Renata
Readers seeking answers to the cliff hanger ending of Orange's Pulitzer nominated debut There, There will have to wait until the second part of this prequel/sequel. First, he travels back to the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 to introduce one of the ancestors of the first novel's protagonists.
The following stories of six generations of Cheyenne and Arapaho forbears - tribes of which Orange is an enrolled member - convey the psychic violence of colonisation and the transcendent strength and spirit required to survive America's war on its first peoples.
The despair, trauma, courage and resistance of these ancestors is echoed in the second part of the novel when Orange resumes the story of brothers Luther, Lony and Orvil Red Feather in present-day Oakland. Recurrent themes of addiction, shame and self-attack are balanced by the redemptive care of family, and the power of a culture, "beating like a drum waiting for its dancer".
More impressionistic than There, There, this sophomore novel resists the pressure to repeat a winning formula - a pressure to which many breakout novelists succumb. Orange is braver, and I'm intrigued to see where this will take his writing next.
You can also listen to Renata's review from RDU below:
