Tommy Orange

The award-winning author on the power and limits of fiction and the breakthrough moment for his second novel, Wandering Stars.

- AMY JONES

In 2018, Tommy Orange took the literary world by storm with his debut novel, There There, which told the story of 12 people from Native communities slowly discovering how their lives are connected as they all work to get to the present-day Big Oakland Powwow. In addition to being named one of the best books of the year by such varied organizations as The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Time, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, and O, The Oprah Magazine (among many others), it was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Orange's highly anticipated second novel, Wandering Stars, is out now, and will firmly establish Orange as one of the most talented writers of our time. It begins with Jude Star, a member of the Southern Cheyenne Tribe, remembering his survival of the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 and his subsequent imprisonment at Richard Henry Platt's prison-castle in Florida, an early precursor to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Gradually, it shifts to Star's son Charles, who is forced to attend the Carlisle school, and follows four additional generations until it meets up with Orvil Red Feather's story, shortly after the closing events of There There.

Wandering Stars, therefore, serves as both a prequel and sequel to There There-though it could just as easily be read as a standalone novel-and features the same deceptively simple, lyrical writing style, with Orange's trademark repetition of words and phrases (e.g., "Such Indian children were made to carry more than they were made to carry" or "He has forgotten that he has forgotten things on purpose"). Orange says this style is "kind of an unconscious thing. I hope it's not some kind of writerly tic that becomes annoying.... I do like the way you can deepen words through repetition and deepen meaning if you're using the same words in the same sentence.