Wandering Stars
Tommy Orange follows his debut There There with a novel that reaches back to 1864, when a young Cheyenne man survives the Sand Creek Massacre only to be forced into a boarding school designed to erase his language and culture. From there the story moves down through the generations to present-day Oakland, returning to characters from There There as it traces how the wounds of one family pass from parent to child. Orange writes about addiction, survival, and inherited trauma with force and tenderness, asking what it means to carry a history that the country keeps trying to forget. The result is both a continuation of his first novel and a story that stands on its own.
What you might want to know about Wandering Stars
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A multigenerational novel tracing one Native American family from the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre to present-day Oakland, both a prequel and sequel to There There.
Yes. Roxane Gay chose it for The Audacious Book Club and said she loved the follow-up even more than There There.
No. Wandering Stars works as a standalone, though it deepens if you have read There There, since it revisits some of the same characters.
Wandering Stars was written by Tommy Orange, published in 2024 by Knopf.
Wandering Stars is 336 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Wandering Stars takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Wandering Stars is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
