Night Came with Many Stars

“The uncanny beauty of Van Booy’s prose, and his ability to knife straight to the depths of a character’s heart, fill a reader with wonder.” —San Francisco Chronicle

In Kentucky, back in 1933, Carol’s daddy lost his 13-year-old daughter in a game of cards. Award-winning author Simon Van Booy’s spellbinding novel spans decades as he tells the story of Carol and the people in her life. Incidents intersect and lives unexpectedly change course in this masterfully interwoven story of chance and choice that leads home again to a night blessed with light.

“What you give in this world,” an old man tells his grandson, “will be given back to you.” Those words illuminate the actions within this unforgettable novel and its connected characters. A young man survives two nearly fatal accidents. A Black family saves an orphaned white boy. A pregnant teenager is rescued by the side of the road. A teenager with developmental disabilities is given his first job. Each incident grows in meaning and power over many decades as we see connections sometimes felt but not always apparent to the people themselves. “Everything was moving,” observes Samuel (Carol’s grandson) in the Kentucky woods. “An invisible force that was everywhere, and made everything touch.”

Told by a master storyteller, Night Came with Many Stars is a rare novel that reveals how wondrous, mysterious, and magically connected life can be—the light Simon Van Booy creates in this novel illuminates our own lives.

Also by Simon Van Booy and available from Godine: The Presence of Absence and Sipsworth.

Praise for Simon Van Booy

Night Came with Many Stars

“Kindness and raw luck undergird Night Came with Many Stars… And like Dickens’s young heroes, Van Booy’s determined souls act with their whole hearts—as does this brave, fierce novel—to earn what good may come.” —Boston Globe

“Van Booy finds the weakness, grace, and beauty of common lives fully lived.” —NPR

“Van Booy is a beautiful storyteller, and his latest offering is no exception.” —New York Post

“A work of great warmth, generosity, and optimism. Van Booy is a writer of grace and empathy.” —The East Hampton Star

“Cycles of racism, violence, and misogyny are disrupted by the grace-filled actions of friends, relatives, and strangers... This well-crafted and often serendipitous saga recognizes that family cannot be escaped but can be expanded.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Van Booy follows two generations of a rural Kentucky family across nearly a century in his fractured, melancholic latest. Themes of resilience and tragedy come through...” —Publishers Weekly

“A beautifully realized, multigenerational family novel that is exceptional for its memorable, fully developed characters. Readers will become emotionally invested…invited to consider the meaning of family and the power of memory.” —Booklist

“Van Booy is a masterful young storyteller, writing from an old soul. His writing often highlights the connectedness of individual lives and the reverberations of a single act for generations.” —Ellen Jarrett, Porter Square Books, in the Boston Globe

“I have long loved the work of Simon Van Booy, and this spare, gorgeously-written novel may be his best yet. These unforgettable characters and the intersection of their destinies through time form a pattern as true and human and beautiful as life itself.” —Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance

“Simon Van Booy’s Night Came with Many Stars is an ambitious and deeply humane novel about the lives of an American family across multiple generations. Not since Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son has middle America been so powerfully evoked and brilliantly animated. This is a monumental novel that brings something new and resonant to the classic American multi-generational family novel.” —Chigozie Obioma, author of The Fishermen

“Beautiful as an old bruise, plain-spoken as a prayer, Night Came with Many rings hard and true with the poetry of real life. Van Booy knows that love and heartache go hand-in-hand—and that cold hard reality is no match for the dreams and longings each of us carry inside.” —Christina Baker Kline, New York Times bestselling author

“Simon Van Booy’s spellbinding novel is told with an exquisite and poetic delicacy, imbued with a profound compassion for the humanity of its characters. It is a gorgeously written, deeply moving triumph.” —Gabriel Byrne, author of Walking with Ghosts

“Simon Van Booy knows about family and long friendship, about betrayal and costly loyalty, about the exquisite and mundane ways we care for one another through sorrow and joy. Tender and searching, Night Came with Many Stars opens worlds to us—worlds of the heart and of small-town America—in prose that is lean and almost reckless in its confidence and beauty.” —Meredith Hall, New York Times bestselling author

“A breathtaking talent and an artist in the fullest sense of the word, few writers sculpt their sentences with such beautiful precision, and fewer still imbue their characters with such depth of humanity. Night Came with Many Stars is a triumph, possibly his best work yet, a devastating, heartbreaking, and deeply truthful novel that will keep its hooks in the reader long beyond the final page. A stunning achievement.” —Billy O'Callaghan, author of Life Sentences

“This beautiful novel left me with a heightened appreciation of the pattern created by each individual life, as well as the larger pattern of several lives overlapping. Night Came with Many Stars is about impermanence and resilience, and the marvelous randomness of the world.” —Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither

The Presence of Absence

“Flows with depth and power....From its outset, The Presence of Absence runs blood-rich with declarations that make you inhale sharply....wide-open wonder. I read it twice, pinching down page-corners to mark phrases . . . soon the book resembled an origami fan.” —Joan Frank, Washington Post

“Rich in setting and emotion. As ever with Van Booy, the reader is in good hands.” —Publishers Weekly

“Simon Van Booy electrifyingly combines story with parable. The Presence of Absence boggles and reverberates: wise, witty and always breathtakingly beautiful.” —San Francisco Chronicle, Best Fiction of the Year

“With its elegant passages on love and the fallibility of memory . . . this indelible portrait of transience, sorrow and hope will move readers.” —Shelf Awareness

“Formally playful and fable-esque . . . If you don't just like reading, but reading about reading, then this is the book for you.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“In Simon Van Booy’s extraordinary novel The Presence of Absence, each well-wrought sentence builds upon the next, taking us deeper into Max Little’s life with staggering lucidity . . . A mind-bending, affecting story that breaks the heart open with startling clarity.” —New York Journal of Books

Sipsworth

“Sipsworth is a love story about a woman and a mouse. Reason suggests that such a relationship couldn’t possibly work, and yet I found myself pulling for this unlikely duo on every page. Simon Van Booy’s characters are loaded with charm, resilience, and the deep desire for connection that all mammals share. I loved it.” —Ann Patchett

“Through tears, laughter, joy, and pain, I just couldn’t stop reading this novel about friendship and second chances. Sipsworth is a marvel—storytelling at its absolute finest.” —Marc Levy

“Whimsical, beautifully detailed, and filled with heart, Sipsworth is a slim, sparkling jewel of a novel.” —Christina Baker Kline