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Summary
Summary
A magical, intoxicating debut novel, both intimate and epic, that intertwines the past, present, and future of two lovers bound by the passing of great comets overhead and a coterie of remarkable ancestors.
Róisín and François are immediately drawn to each other when they meet at a remote research base on the frozen ice sheets of Antarctica. At first glance, the pair could not be more different. Older by a few years, Róisín, a daughter of Ireland and a peripatetic astronomer, joins the science team to observe the fracturing of a comet overhead. François, the base's chef, has just left his birthplace in Bayeux, France, for only the second time in his life. Yet devastating tragedy and the longing for a fresh start, which they share, as well as an indelible but unknown bond that stretches back centuries, connect them to each other.
Helen Sedgwick carefully unfolds their surprisingly intertwined paths, moving forward and back through time to reveal how these lovers' destinies have long been tied to each other by the skies--the arrival of comets great and small. In telling Róisín and François's story, Sedgwick illuminates the lives of their ancestors, showing how strangers can be connected and ghosts can be real, and how the way we choose to see the world can be as desolate or as beautiful as the comets themselves.
A mesmerizing, skillfully crafted, and emotionally perceptive novel that explores the choices we make, the connections we miss, and the ties that inextricably join our fates, The Comet Seekers reflects how the shifting cosmos unite us all through life, beyond death, and across the whole of time.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Haunted characters struggle to find fulfillment.In her ambitious but flawed debut novel, journalist, editor, and former research physicist Sedgwick leaps through time, from 1066 to the present, following the trajectories of her characters lives as various comets surge gloriously through the night skies. She focuses on four main characters: cousins Risn and Liam are star-crossed lovers both because of their consanguinity and their unbridgeable differences. Risn, an astronomer, wants to travel the world researching the cosmos; Liam is committed to staying on his familys farm. The second pair is a mother and son, Severine and Franois. Even as a child, Franois longed to explore far-off places, from South American jungles to Antarcticas wild emptiness; but Severine will not leave their native Bayeux, France, because she is surrounded there by 11 ghosts from her familys long past. These ghosts are the novels liveliest characters: playful, teasing, and so comforting that Severine cannot live without them; they are more crucial to her than Franois. Why should she have to choose, she asks herself, between her ghosts and her son? Among the ghosts, Severine is especially attached to her grandmother, who everyone thought was crazy, who made the world come alive, whose smile made Severine feel special, and loved. Because Grannys ghost treats her like a child, Severine seems infantilizedor, maybe, crazy. Franois can hardly make sense of his strange mother. Rather than allowing her characters to evolve, Sedgwick belabors their predicaments in chapter after chapter. The image of shooting stars suggests a theme: as Risn explains, All those stars we see...theyre dead already. They have exploded, rejected everything that they were, and the raw components, the elements they were made of, that is where life comes from. But this idea of transformation is only barely hinted at, and, except for Severine, the characters persist in sadness.Unlike shooting stars, Sedgwicks yearning protagonists seem unable or unwilling to shower the world with light. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
When astronomers François and Róisín meet in Antarctica to observe a comet, it feels like they've been connected for decades, both having overcome much to explore the skies. Róisín, we learn, became an astronomer at the cost of losing her first and most intense love, her cousin Liam; meanwhile, François is attempting to put his own family history behind him by traveling to Antarctica only the second time he has left his home in France. Moving backward and forward in time, we follow the separate paths of the two characters, visiting them at the times the comets to which they are both drawn are visible. The universe in all its wonders, Sedgwick suggests, draws these two together just when they need it the most. Readers will be enveloped in the magical world that Sedgwick creates and will grapple with the big issues she tackles love, family, freedom, and loneliness. Those who are drawn to intimate stories of family drama are sure to respond to this beautiful, character-driven novel, which is reminiscent of the work of Amy Bloom and Elizabeth Strout.--Sexton, Kathy Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
TRICK QUESTION: WHAT do the Bayeux Tapestry, the British Antarctic Survey's research station on the Weddell Sea, multiple sightings of comets and a family of ghosts dating back to the 11th century have in common? More than you'd think, in the world of Helen Sedgwick's unusual debut novel, "The Comet Seekers." I'm not sure just how to describe this book: It's not exactly a ghost story or a gothic or a paranormal romance. Unlike with Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw," the reader can't doubt the sanity of those perceiving the ghosts or the reality of the ghosts themselves. A fluid narrative voice, pointedly lyrical and without a trace of irony, gives equal weight to the perceptions of both ghosts and living characters. And, as in the work of contemporary fabulists like Kelly Link, Helen Oyeyemi and Audrey Niffenegger, the real intersects matter-of-factly with the supernatural. In the very near future - the novel starts and ends in 2017 - Roisin, an Irish astrophysicist, and François, a somewhat younger French chef, meet at the Halley VI research station in Antarctica, which is "elevated above the floating ice, a strange caterpillar of research labs and sleeping quarters with a central red hub where they all meet to talk and wait for snowstorms to pass." She's there to observe a comet, he to cook for the staff. Both are haunted metaphorically by the recent loss of a loved one. But they're also haunted literally, even if they don't know it: They've been brought together partly through the actions of some ghosts, ancestors of François who have a connection to Roisin's family. Like all good literary ghosts, these appear and disappear according to particular rules. Sedgwick divulges these slowly and sparingly, so that figuring out the ghost-logic becomes part of the fun. One rule we learn early on is that the ghosts appear only when a comet is visible to a living member of François's family - in particular his mother, Severine. As a girl, she first hears about the ghosts from her beloved granny. Later she's able to perceive them herself, and in her company we slowly unravel the mystery of each ghost's identity. The chapters, arranged nonchronologically but dated and named after particular comets - "1759: Halley's Comet," for example; "1994: Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9" - alternate among scenes of François's and Roisin's lives before arriving in Antarctica and brief glimpses, often at the moment of death, of Severine's ancestors. As we leap through time and space, that structure combines with the use of the present tense to suggest that everything is taking place in an eternal now. But how are the pieces related? The Bayeux Tapestry, which includes in its depiction of the Battle of Hastings what looks like a shooting star, later identified as Halley's comet, provides a key piece of the puzzle. Severine and her family have long lived, not coincidentally, in the Normandy town of Bayeux, and late in her life, when she visits the tapestry one last time with François, she shows him one special panel. Here we see "a woman, eyes looking out from the pale background, her hair in a red shawl. Behind her, an older man clasps her face in threat: Ubi unus clericus et Ælfgyva. Ælfgifu. It's her. The ghost his mama always talks about; she had come from the tapestry." Many of this novel's pleasures have to do with teasing out the implications of Sedgwick's intricate pattern, which substitutes for a traditional plot and, sometimes, for a deeper engagement with character. This web of associations, spun by recurring images and figures, lends a different spin to the idea of a love that's meant to be. ? ANDREA BARRETT'S most recent book is "Archangel," a collection of short fiction.
Library Journal Review
A literary editor and former physicist, British writer and debut novelist Sedgwick weaves science and the imagination into a melancholy yet magical tale of long-departed souls who won't rest until they can impose their will upon their living relations. In a narrative spanning centuries and continents, from France to Ireland to Antarctica, the spirits materialize with the appearance of historic comets. Protagonist Róisín has always been captivated by the night sky; as a kid in Ireland, she and younger cousin Liam would lie in the fields each night while she taught him about the constellations, hoping to glimpse a comet. Years later they become lovers, but Liam knows he cannot hold on to the peripatetic Róisín, now an astronomer who longs to see the world. In Bayeux, France, a young chef, François, is also afflicted with wanderlust. But can he leave his mother while she's hearing voices and showing signs of dementia? When François and Róisín finally meet at a scientific outpost in Antarctica, is it fate that causes them inexplicably to recognize each other or the machinations of the ancestors trying to right wrongs from centuries past? VERDICT Readers would do well to suspend disbelief and open their hearts to the romance, the lush prose, and the mystery of Sedgwick's original and inventive debut. [See Prepub Alert, 4/3/16.]-Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.