The Summer of Shooting Stars
244 pages
January 12, 2027
It is the summer of 1989—but not the summer you remember. This is the summer of shooting stars, when every evening the Ohio sky blazes with hundreds of meteors burning high in the atmosphere, a season that begins in wonder and ends in terror.
| Hardcover | ISBN 9781639822492 | $39.00 |
| Paperback | ISBN 9781639822485 | $22.00 |
| eBook | ISBN 9781639822508 | $12.99 |
It is the summer of 1989—but not the summer you remember. This is the summer of shooting stars, when every evening the Ohio sky blazes with hundreds of meteors burning high in the atmosphere, a season that begins in wonder and ends in terror.
Fourteen-year-old Hustle spends his days with his best friend Dmitri, peering through neighbors’ windows, hanging around the record store on Lee Road, and hammering fossil trilobites from the shale in the park. At home, his older brother Tommy—Hustle’s hero—has begun slipping deeper into trouble, though Hustle cannot understand why. Meanwhile, their father, an immigrant from wartime Germany, works alone in the garage, meticulously building an extraordinary birdhouse: a perfect replica of the home destroyed in his bombed-out childhood.
Then Tommy disappears.
When a strange young man with wet lips and bright red hair begins appearing at the house, asking unsettling questions, Hustle becomes convinced that Tommy is in real danger. Desperate to bring his brother home and keep his family from coming apart, Hustle sets out to find him. But where has Tommy gone—and what secret life has he been trying to escape?
As the meteors begin striking the earth and the summer sky grows increasingly violent, Hustle is forced toward truths about family, love, and betrayal that he may not be ready to face.
What Others Are Saying
I would read The Summer of Shooting Stars for Kevin Prufer’s sheer virtuosity—the pitch-perfect voice; the deft shifts in chronology; the way a sentence turns malleable and becomes exactly the tool needed to unlock a scene. And I would read it for the way Prufer captures America’s contradictions, walking us just far enough from our known reality that we can turn and see ourselves: our fears, our insistent confidence, the tragedy that spins wildly out of our failures to know each other. I cared so much for the characters in this novel that I could barely sit still when they were in trouble, and caught myself exclaiming aloud each time something broke loose inside them and allowed them to leap.
Rachel Kadish, author of The Weight of Ink
To read The Summer of Shooting Stars is to feel the world turning, to sense the danger and precarity of life, and to live on in spite of the rain of fire on the horizon. Prufer’s prose is ruminative, self-aware, and sensitively written. This book will land on your heart and thoughts like a meteor.
Phong Nguyen, author of The Three Daughters of Annam
