3.5
The Radiant Dark
ByPublisher Description
INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER • A People Best Book of the Month • An Apple Best Book of the Month
“Beautifully written and full of wonder and humanity.” — People
“Just as engrossing as the mysteries swirling in outer space.”—The New York Times Book Review
In the wake of First Contact, one mother upends her life and her children’s futures, as humanity reckons with its place in the universe.
It’s March 1980, and Carol Girard and her husband are living an ordinary life in a small town in the Adirondacks. They have just had their first child, and though Carol is struggling with the challenges of new motherhood, her future seems clear. Until something extraordinary happens: an inexplicable flickering of light in the sky, which is ultimately determined to be communication from intelligent life on another planet. But these beings are eleven light-years away, and nothing is known about them other than the fact that they seem to know we exist, too.
As humanity reels from a shifting understanding of its place in the universe, we follow the stories of the Girard family: Carol, whose fascination with this other life sparks a desperate search for spiritual meaning; Michael, her loyal son, who finds solace not in the stars above his head but in the ground beneath his feet; and Ro, Carol’s bright and ambitious daughter, whose childhood goal to work in interstellar communication will evolve into something far grander.
Tracing five decades of love, loss, ambition, and self-discovery, The Radiant Dark is "Daring and expansive, soul-stirring, and precise, this is a novel about love and belonging.” (Eliana Ramage, author of To the Moon and Back).
“Beautifully written and full of wonder and humanity.” — People
“Just as engrossing as the mysteries swirling in outer space.”—The New York Times Book Review
In the wake of First Contact, one mother upends her life and her children’s futures, as humanity reckons with its place in the universe.
It’s March 1980, and Carol Girard and her husband are living an ordinary life in a small town in the Adirondacks. They have just had their first child, and though Carol is struggling with the challenges of new motherhood, her future seems clear. Until something extraordinary happens: an inexplicable flickering of light in the sky, which is ultimately determined to be communication from intelligent life on another planet. But these beings are eleven light-years away, and nothing is known about them other than the fact that they seem to know we exist, too.
As humanity reels from a shifting understanding of its place in the universe, we follow the stories of the Girard family: Carol, whose fascination with this other life sparks a desperate search for spiritual meaning; Michael, her loyal son, who finds solace not in the stars above his head but in the ground beneath his feet; and Ro, Carol’s bright and ambitious daughter, whose childhood goal to work in interstellar communication will evolve into something far grander.
Tracing five decades of love, loss, ambition, and self-discovery, The Radiant Dark is "Daring and expansive, soul-stirring, and precise, this is a novel about love and belonging.” (Eliana Ramage, author of To the Moon and Back).
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Radiant Dark Reviews
3.5
“Leaned a little harder into family dynamics and interpersonal drama than I initially thought it would for a science fiction book but the story wove through the decades in a satisfying way.”
About Alexandra Oliva
Alexandra Oliva is the author of USA Today bestseller The Radiant Dark, Forget Me Not, and The Last One, which was selected as a Best Book of 2016 by The Seattle Times and translated into twenty-five languages. Ali grew up in a tiny town in New York's Adirondack Mountains and received her BA from Yale University and her MFA from The New School. She now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.
Other books by Alexandra Oliva
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