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WHEN ALL IS LOST, WHAT CAN BE SAVED?
She knew it was the third day when she woke. Even in the twists and tangles of the fever, her sense of time had remained unbroken . . .
As the disease spread, people did what people always do. They clung and grabbed and mauled one another. They queued at the hospitals. They died in the waiting rooms. They clutched at their lovers and held on to their children.
And the disease rampaged joyously, burning through thought and will, then flesh, and, at the very last, through bone – until there was nothing but dust, and no one left to mourn over it.
Dust to dust, Jamie thought, rising slowly.
About the author
Anne Corlett has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and has won a number of awards for her short stories, including the H. E. Bates Award. She works as a criminal solicitor and freelance writer, and lives with her partner and three young boys in Somerset. The Space Between The Stars is her first novel.
Summary
The Space between the Stars by Anne Corlett is an enthralling novel of love, the choices we make, and what it means to be human. It's also a dramatic road-trip across the stars, as a woman journeys across a plague-ravaged universe to the place she once called home, and the man she once loved.
How far would you travel to find your way home?
Jamie Allenby wakes, alone, and realizes her fever has broken. But could everyone she knows be dead? Months earlier, Jamie had left her partner Daniel, mourning the miscarriage of their baby. She’d just had to get away, so took a job on a distant planet. Then the virus hit.
Jamie survived as it swept through our far-flung colonies. Now she feels desperate and isolated, until she receives a garbled message from Earth. If someone from her past is still alive – perhaps Daniel – she knows she must find a way to return.
She meets others seeking Earth, and their ill-matched group will travel across space to achieve their dream. But they’ll clash with survivors intent on repeating humanity’s past mistakes, threatening their precious fresh start. Jamie will also get a second chance at happiness. But can she escape her troubled past, to embrace a hopeful future?
Foreword
A novel of love, loss and second chances from debut novelist Anne Corlett, perfect for fans of Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven.
Additional text
The Space Between The Stars is – for me, at least – this year’s Station Eleven . . . it spoke straight to my heart and unstrung it, leaving me crying quietly on an aeroplane . . . Like Station Eleven, this is a story that uses a SF conceit to explore human nature rather than a story that is interested in its SF trappings
