The Stars Are Fire A Novel

A New York Times Bestseller from the acclaimed author of The Weight of Water and The Pilot’s Wife—an exquisitely suspenseful novel about an extraordinary young woman tested by catastrophe, based on the true story of the largest fire in Maine’s history.

This one hits close to home for us.

October 1947. An unseasonably hot, dry summer has turned the state of Maine into a tinderbox. Grace Holland—five months pregnant, caring for two toddlers, and quietly estranged from her husband, Gene—has resigned herself to a life of loneliness and domestic chores. Then, one night, she wakes to find wildfires racing down the coast. Closer and closer to her home.

Forced to pull her children into the ocean to escape the flames, Grace watches everything she knows burn to the ground. By morning she is homeless, penniless, and awaiting word of her husband’s fate in a town that no longer exists. But through the smoke, she glimpses something unexpected: the chance to rewrite her own story.

“Long before Liane Moriarty was spinning her ‘Big Little Lies,’ Shreve was spicing up domestic doings in beachfront settings with terrible husbands and third-act twists. She still is, as effectively as ever.” —New York Times Book Review

For readers who love historical fiction with a pulse, this is a story of courage, resilience, and reinvention—set against a slice of Maine history many of us have never forgotten.

A perfect companion for a salty afternoon by the cove, when the wind kicks up and you want to linger a little longer in someone else’s world. Come find it on our shelves.

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