‘There was a planet that couldn’t figure out where everyone was. It died of loneliness. That happened billions of times in our galaxy alone.’

Theo Byrne is an astrobiologist whose career has been spent searching the skies for life beyond the cosmos. He’s also a recent widow and only father fighting to protect his 9-year-old from a system that wants him labelled with Asperger’s. When Robin is threatened with expulsion from school, Theo whisks him away to camp under the stars, painting new potential planets in the sky as he tries to convince them both that life can thrive under even the most impossible circumstances. When they get home, Theo signs Robin up for an experimental neurofeedback therapy using recordings of his dead mother’s brain activity to help stabilise his emotions.

Richard Power’s Booker Prize shortlisted novel is both brutal and heart-warming, intimate and profound. A masterfully curated story of love, grief and loneliness, that quietly builds to an inevitable and devastating close.