Light from Other Stars

A Novel

Erika Swyler

A Long Island Reads 2020 Selection * A Real Simple Best Book of 2019

From the bestselling author of The Book of Speculation, a "tender and ambitious" (Vulture) novel about time, loss, and the wonders of the universe.

Eleven-year-old Nedda Papas is obsessed with becoming an astronaut. In 1986 in Easter, a small Florida Space Coast town, her dreams seem almost within reach--if she can just grow up fast enough. Theo, the scientist father she idolizes, is consumed by his own obsessions. Laid off from his job at NASA and still reeling from the loss of Nedda's newborn brother several years before, Theo turns to the dangerous dream of extending his daughter's childhood just a little longer. The result is an invention that alters the fabric of time.

Decades later, Nedda has achieved her long-held dream and is traveling aboard the space ship Chawla, part of a small group hoping to colonize a distant planet. But as she floats in zero gravity, far from earth, she and her crewmates face a serious crisis. Nedda may hold the key to the solution, if she can come to terms with her past and the future that awaits her.

For fans of The Age of Miracles and The Immortalists, Erika Swyler's Light from Other Stars is a masterful and ambitious novel about fathers and daughters, women and the forces that hold them back, and the true meaning of progress.

Table of contents

• Cover
• More Praise for Light from Other Stars
• Half Title
• Dedication
• By the Same Author
• Title Page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Aboard Chawla
• 1986: Seven
• 1986: Fabrication and Loss
• Crucible
• 1986: Mico Argentatus
• Dilation and Paradox
• 1986: Entropy
• 1986: The Dogs
• 1986: Bruise and Tape
• Aboard Chawla
• 1986: Dawning
• 1986: Grove and Light
• Aboard Chawla
• 1986: Firecracker Dance
• Protraction
• 1986: The Thread
• 1986: Into the Mouth
• Aboard Chawla
• 1986: Oscillation
• Potential
• 1986: Kinetic
• 1986: Child and Man
• Aboard Chawla
• 1986: The Dead
• 1986: Pete McIntyre
• Aboard Chawla
• 1986: Books
• Protraction
• 1986: Infancy and Age
• Aboard Chawla
• 1986: Mr. Pete’s House
• Aboard Chawla
• 1986: Electromagnet
• 1986: The Town
• 1986: Sequence
• 1986: Assemble
• Aboard Chawla
• The Break
• Revelation
• 299,792,458 m/s
• And After
• 1989: Amadeus
• Chawla
• Fall and Rise
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on the Author
• Copyright