Contemporary Authors

• The Girnin Gates: Changing Ways of Life in Drumchapel Freight Design (Glasgow, Scotland), 2009
• The Comet Seekers Harper (New York, NY), 2016

1. The comet seekers LCCN 2016008606 Type of material Book Personal name Sedgwick, Helen, 1978- author. Main title The comet seekers / Helen Sedgwick. Edition First U.S. edition. Published/Produced New York, NY : Harper, [2016] Description 290 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780062448767 (hardback) CALL NUMBER PR6119.E37 C66 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Harper Collins - https://www.harpercollins.com/cr-123481/helen-sedgwick

  Discover Author
  Helen Sedgwick

  Helen Sedgwick
  Biography
  Helen Sedgwick is a writer, editor, and physicist, who grew up in London and now lives in the Scottish highlands. Helen was the managing director of Cargo Publishing from 2014 to 2015, and she founded Wildland Literary Editors in 2012. The same year she won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and since then her writing has been published internationally and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She was awarded a distinction from the MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University in 2008. Before that, she worked as a research physicist, earning a PhD in Physics from Edinburgh University. She lives near the Dornoch Firth with her partner, photographer Michael Gallacher.

• Author Homepage home / books / - http://www.helensedgwick.com

  Helen Sedgwick is the author of The Comet Seekers (Harvill Secker, 2016) and The Growing Season (Harvill Secker, 2017).

  Helen has an MLitt in Creative Writing from Glasgow University and has won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. Her debut novel has been published in seven countries including the UK, US and Canada, and was selected as one of the best books of 2016 by The Herald and Glamour. She is represented by Cathryn Summerhayes of Curtis Brown.

  As a literary editor, Helen has worked as the managing director of Cargo Publishing and managing editor of Gutter, and she founded Wildland Literary Editors in 2012. Before that, Helen was a research physicist with a PhD in Physics from Edinburgh University.

  ===

  BOOKS

  The Growing Season

  What if anyone could grow a baby?

  With FullLife’s safe and affordable healthcare plan, why risk natural birth? Just choose the colour of your pouch and its accessories.

  Without the pouch, Eva might not have been born. And yet she has sacrificed her career, and maybe even her relationship, campaigning against FullLife’s biotech baby pouches. Despite her effort, everyone prefers a world where women are liberated from danger and constraint and all can share the joy of childbearing. Perhaps FullLife has helped transform society for the best? But just as Eva decides to accept this, she discovers that something strange is happening at FullLife.

  Piotr hasn’t seen Eva in years. Not since their life together dissolved in tragedy. But Piotr’s a journalist who has also uncovered something sinister about FullLife. What drove him and Eva apart may just bring them back together, as they search for the truth behind FullLife’s closed doors, and face a truth of their own.

  The Comet Seekers

  Left: UK paperback cover, right: US paperback cover

  Two lives.
  A thousand years.
  One night sky.

  Róisín and François first meet in the snowy white expanse of Antarctica. And everything changes.

  While Róisín grew up in a tiny village in Ireland, ablaze with a passion for science and the skies and all there is to discover about the world, François was raised by his young mother, who dreamt of new worlds but was unable to turn her back on her past.

  As we loop back through their lives, glimpsing each of them only when a comet is visible in the skies above, we see how their paths cross as they come closer and closer to this moment. Theirs are stories filled with love and hope and heartbreak, that show how strangers can be connected and ghosts can be real, and the world can be as lonely or as beautiful as the comets themselves.

  Left: UK hardback cover, right: US hardback cover

  Reviews for The Comet Seekers

  “An exquisitely layered, thrilling novel, which leaps across centuries and continents to delve into the role of destiny and the elusiveness of perception and memory.” ~ New York Times

  “A stellar love story that echoes down decades and centuries… Sedgwick’s talent shines dazzlingly bright in this ambitious literary debut.” ~ Glamour, 10 Best Novels of 2016

  “Many of this novel’s pleasures have to do with teasing out the implications of Sedgwick’s intricate pattern…This web of associations, spun by recurring images and figures, lends a different spin to the idea of a love that’s meant to be.” ~ New York Times Book Review

  “Helen Sedgwick’s story of many lives linked by comets over earth is brave, tender, vivid and magical.” ~ The Herald, Best Books of 2016

  “A breathtaking tale full of love, hope and heartbreak. You’ll be utterly captivated from the first page.” ~ Elle, Book of the Month

  “A haunting and wonderfully ethereal debut novel about first loves, inescapable loss, and the search for one’s place in a complicated world. …Uniquely structured and stylistically fascinating.” ~ Publishers Weekly

  “A Spellbinding tale of love and loss, aglimmer with passion and melancholy.” ~ Sunday Express, S Magazine

  “Sedgwick is a highly evocative writer who makes excellent use of nature to showcase her themes. …[This] charming debut maps the world’s big questions on an even larger plane.” ~ Irish Times

  “The novel is a beautiful balance of contrasts, of characters who work the earth and those who study the sky, of those driven to travel and those tied to home.” ~ The List

  “The elegance of this story is a little like a tapestry itself. The stitchery is deliberate and varied… This is a novel worthy of more than one reading.” ~ Otago Daily Times

• Scotland Herald - http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/14736415.Face_to_Face__Author_Helen_Sedgwick_on_her_first_novel_The_Comet_Seekers_and_the_consoling_scale_of_the_universe/

  Face to Face: Author Helen Sedgwick on her first novel The Comet Seekers and the consoling scale of the universe

  (2) View gallery

  11 Sep 2016 / Teddy Jamieson
  0 comments
  Let’s start with a question. When you step outside on a clear night and look upwards what is it you feel? There you are, gazing up at the milky swirl of stars nesting in the infinite immensity of the universe. Do you suddenly think all our human problems are laughably unimportant when set against the cosmic scale of deep space and time? Do you reckon that really as a species we have an overinflated sense of ourselves? Do you realise, in short, that humanity quite frankly bums itself up rather too much?

  No? Just me?

  Helen Sedgwick starts laughing when I bring up our possibly overinflated sense of importance in the face of the cosmic. “You can look at it both ways,” she says consolingly. “I find the vastness of the universe incredibly comforting personally. I know people who find it the opposite of that. You can look at it and think ‘we’re insignificant, we’re nothing in all of this.’

  “But you can also look out and think ‘we’re part of this and look at how huge it is. We’re connected to something that is indescribably massive and so full of potential that we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of. So, in a way, I love that feeling of being part of something that is so much larger than myself.”

  Mankind’s importance (or otherwise) in the grand scheme of things seems like a good way to start a Friday morning. A Friday morning, in this case, after the night before. Last evening Sedgwick was at the Glasgow launch of her debut novel The Comet Seekers, a novel that rather wonderfully rubs up the vastness of space and time against human love and desire. How’s her head this morning? “It’s a little tender,” she admits.

  And yet here she is in a Glasgow hotel looking bright-eyed and bubbling with enthusiasm about art and science and the fact she is now a published author at the third time of asking (she’s got two unpublished novels in her drawers and for a time she worried that The Comet Seekers would be joining them.)

  Thankfully that is not the case. Sedgwick’s novel is elegantly structured, full of feeling and really rather good.

  The Comet Seekers is both a scientific romance and a romantic vision of science. As the title suggests, comets are involved. Sedgwick uses them as a way of bridging time and narrative as she jumps back and forth through the centuries and the various stories she tells. The novel takes in the Bayeux Tapestry (on which Halley’s Comet makes a guest appearance) and the icy wastes of Antarctica. (“I would love to go to Antarctica,” Sedgwick says. “I’ve never been. That was pure wish fulfilment.”)

  Sedgwick herself is something of a human bridge between the arts and science, “two cultures”, as scientist and novelist CP Snow suggested back in 1959, far, far apart. She's been both a literary editor and a research physicist in her time.

  Now 38, Sedgwick was born and brought up in Chiswick in London fascinated by the night sky and with a father who was equally as interested (in fact, she tells me, he’s just finished a PHD in astrophysics himself). Stargazing is, she thinks, the origin of her own interest in science.

  “Wanting not just to look at them but to understand what it was I was looking at. The more you know the more fascinating it becomes. You realise you are looking into the past as well. You’re looking back to what’s already happened.”

  She went to Bristol to study astrophysics before coming to Edinburgh in 2000 to do a PhD. She stayed on in an academic position before switching to work on cancer research in the bioelectronics groups at Glasgow University.

  “While I was in Glasgow I started to realise that perhaps I didn’t want to be a scientist forever. I was working with some fairly nasty chemicals at Glasgow University in a clean room etching into glass and silicon, wearing the full clean suit working in this funny light because you have to keep natural light away from your samples. So I was going home every day with a splitting headache for one thing.

  “And it’s quite stressful and I just thought ‘actually this isn’t how I want my whole life to be,’ even though I loved the ideas, I loved talking about the science, I loved what I was trying to achieve. But the day-to-day reality didn’t really suit me.”

  She went part-time and started studying for an MLit with the Creative Writing group at the university. Two unpublished books later she finally got a call last June saying she was going to be a published author. ”That was one of the best moments,” she says, smiling.

  Having been on both sides of CP Snow’s divide does she think, more than 50 years on, the gap has narrowed between the arts and science? No, Sedgwick says. In her experience they’re still quite separate.

  “I think it’s happening at school. You’re having this separation from a young age and you’re either pushed towards the sciences or you’re pushed towards the arts. My school was very accommodating. I wanted to do a mixture of both. I did three sciences for GCSEs and I wanted to do music, but there was a clash so I ended up doing music at another school.

  “My school tried hard to allow me to do that but it was obviously not the way the system was set up. You had to choose one way or the other. That’s how it’s timetabled.”

  She worries too, that at school, science is presented as a subject that requires hard answers. Yes or no. Right or wrong. “I think that’s a very uninspiring way to approach it because science should be about asking questions and about curiosity.

  “I did an event a little while ago where I said I thought scientific discovery was magical. A scientist got in touch with me afterwards and said ‘you’re missing the point. Science is not magic. Science is fact.’ And I would say: ‘Yes, science is rooted in fact and you’re looking for proof, you’re looking for evidence.

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  “But at the same time there’s something incredibly magical about the way the world works. Magic doesn’t have to mean ‘unexplained’. It can mean something that’s beyond our common sense, that goes further than our own experience. I think that’s what science does do and that’s why I find it magical.”

  That’s not typical though, is it? It’s become something of a truism to say there are not enough girls studying science. Was that borne our during her science career? “The women were certainly a minority in all the universities I’ve ever worked at. But I never felt I was unwelcome. I think universities would love to have more women scientists. I think it’s something that is happening much, much younger.”

  So what should schools do? “If I knew that I’d be in politics. I think it’s about encouraging ideas and imagination. Using the arts within science to explore some of the ideas and open them up in a more imaginative way could really help.”

  Her book does that, of course. “Yeah, I want to make it exciting again.”

  Not that the arts always help the situation. Where else does the stereotype of the cold, unfeeling scientist come but from fiction? “It’s so strange. It’s certainly not something I’ve encountered in real life. Scientists are passionate and creative and complex human beings.”

  She could be describing herself of course. In person, she comes across as a mixture of restless energy and eloquent precision.

  These days Sedgwick is living in Tain in the Highlands with her photographer boyfriend Michael. They both wanted a break from city life. And it turns out living in the country suits her, she says. “There’s something about having the peace, the head space, to think really deeply about something. In cities sometimes there’s so much noise intruding – other people, what’s happening and who’s doing what and where should I be and this constant anxiety. I’ve moved out to the country now and it’s gone. It’s so peaceful and I find it so much easier to write there.”

  Good for writing then and presumably good for night skies? “So good. It’s wonderful. Everything from comets to the aurora. I think we’ll be here a while. But we’ve only been here a year and looking at my track record after four or five years I may want to move on. So we’ll see. I might make Antarctica yet.”

  The Comet Seekers is published by Harvill Secker, priced £12.99. Helen Sedgwick will be discussing her novel at the Wigtown Book Festival on Sunday, September 25 at 3pm. To book tickets visit wigtownbookfestival.com/

• American Booksellers Association - http://www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-qa-helen-sedgwick-34982

  An Indies Introduce Q&A With Helen Sedgwick
  Posted on Friday, Nov 18, 2016
  Printer-friendly versionPrinter-friendly versionSend by emailSend by email
  Helen Sedgwick, author of The Comet SeekersHelen Sedgwick is the author of the Summer/Fall 2016 Indies Introduce debut The Comet Seekers (Harper).

  In The Comet Seekers, Róisín, an Irish astronomer, meets François, a French chef from the Bayeux region, at a research station in Antarctica, where a science team is observing a fracturing comet.

  Joe Strebel of Anderson’s Bookshops in Naperville, Illinois, said Sedgwick’s debut “is a moving novel that establishes its unique tone and lyrical beauty from the opening sentence and sustains that level through a multi-generational story showing the tension of loyalty to family and home against the lure and opportunities of the outside world.”

  Sedgwick grew up in London and now lives in the Scottish Highlands with her partner, photographer Michael Gallacher. She is a writer, editor, and former research physicist and the recipient of the 2012 Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award.

  Strebel, who served on the Indies Introduce adult debut selection committee, had the opportunity to discuss The Comet Seekers with the author.

  Cover image for The Comet Seekers by Helen SedgwickJoe Strebel: François’ mother, Severine, sees and speaks to her ancestors. Are the ghosts to be taken as real, or do they represent some familial or genetic memory? Or is Severine mad?

  Helen Sedgwick: I love the ambiguity surrounding the ghosts because I want readers to have the chance to decide for themselves whether they’re real or not. It was important to me that the book could work on multiple levels in that respect — so they can be as real as you want them to be. For me, the ghosts are not real in the physical sense but they are very real to Severine, and there are several ways to interpret what she sees. The ghosts could be some form of hallucination, perhaps a symptom of a hereditary mental illness. They could be a kind of genetic memory or a representation of her family history. They could be a side effect of her physical illness. Or, my personal favorite, they could be a product of her imagination. Our imaginations give us a way of coping with loss and loneliness, I think, and perhaps that’s what Severine is doing. But it also seems to me that we’re all haunted in some way, and the ghosts represent that sense of the past being a part of who we are, whether we choose to engage with it or not.

  JS: Comets serve as a unifying element in the book and also energize the ghosts. Why did you choose comets for this role?

  HS: Comets get to travel out to the farthest reaches of the solar system, and yet it is the gravitational pull of the sun that makes their orbits possible and inevitably brings them close to us again. After each visit, they might only return hundreds or thousands of years later, and that gave me a way to connect characters living centuries or millennia apart. In 1986, just like in 1456 and 1066, people could look up and see Halley’s Comet overhead, and it was the same comet they were looking at as their ancestors would have seen. I think that’s amazing. So in the novel the return of the comets provides a connection through the centuries. The shape of their orbits reflects both the structure of the novel and the characters’ journeys. But comets also get to see a lot more than the Earth, and I wanted to give the ghosts some of that freedom. The ghosts (like many of the characters in the book) are bound to their home just as comets are bound to the sun, but they also get to speed through the sky and discover what lies beyond the known solar system. I wanted them to have that. Perhaps I want it for myself, too!

  JS: Is astronomy — comets in particular — one of your interests?

  HS: I’ve always been fascinated by astronomy. I can remember looking up at the stars when I was young, not only finding the night sky beautiful but also wanting to understand what was out there and why it behaved the way it did. There is so much we don’t know about the universe and so much for us still to discover — I find that exciting. But I chose a different subject for my scientific career, working in soft condensed matter physics and then bioengineering for cancer research. Astronomy will always be a love of mine, though, and I think it will always be a subject I love to write about. I find it so inspiring to imagine all the possibilities out there, in the universe.

  JS: Why did you choose to include the Bayeux Tapestry in the novel?

  HS: I wanted the novel to combine my interest in astrophysics with my interest in history, and the Bayeux Tapestry gave me a way to do that. It’s from a different time, it has lasted a thousand years, and it gives us a glimpse of a different way of life, but it also features strikingly beautiful embroidery of Halley’s Comet. There is a group of soldiers pointing up at the comet in awe, and to me their reaction is the same as people have had through the centuries. As I started researching the Bayeux Tapestry, I discovered [the figure] Ælfgyva and became fascinated with the mystery of who she might have been. I realized I wanted to write her story, the personal story behind the embroidery that history hasn’t written.

  JS: Róisín is torn between staying with her cousin/lover, Liam, and pursuing her career. François also faces the conflict of staying close to Severine and traveling the world. The tension between the pulls of home and the outside world seems to be a prominent theme, as is the weight of ancestral history. Are these the main thrusts of the novel?

  HS: One of the main themes is the conflict between wanting to belong and wanting to be free, which for different characters appears as the opposing pulls of closeness and distance, or family versus independence. It’s about the present as a product of the past, and how what has come before shapes us in ways we might not understand. But it is also a book about choice. Many of the characters have to choose what to believe in: Róisín chooses science and adventure, Severine chooses ghosts and imagination, Liam chooses Róisín and the reality of his farm. But their choices beg questions about how we interpret reality. Severine’s ghosts might not be real, but through them she finds more happiness than Liam ever can with his realism. And what happens if we feel we have no choice? Are we powerless? Róisín loves the idea of a comet splitting apart because even though it’s been following the same path for thousands of years, unexpected things can still happen. I was once asked if this was a book about destiny, and my answer was that it is completely the opposite. It’s a book about how things can change if we choose to change them.

  The Comet Seekers by Helen Sedgwick (Harper, hardcover, 9780062448767) Publication date: October 11, 2016.

  Learn more about the author at helensedgwick.com or follow her on Twitter.

  ABA member stores are invited to use this interview or any others in our series of Q&As with Indies Introduce debut authors in newsletters and social media and in online and in-store promotions. Please let us know if you do.

  Send by emailSend by email | Categories: IndieBoundIndies Introduce Interview

5/8/17, 9)47 AM
Print Marked Items
The Comet Seekers
Publishers Weekly.
263.35 (Aug. 29, 2016): p61. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Comet Seekers
Helen Sedgwick. Harper, $25.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-06-244876-7 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Former research physicist Sedgwick mines the mysteries of the solar system and human desire to craft a haunting and wonderfully ethereal debut novel about first loves, inescapable loss, and the search for one's place in a complicated world. When Roisin, an Irish scientist studying comets, and Francois, a French chef, reunite at a research base in the frigid wilds of Antarctica in 2017, the two seem virtually broken because of their respective pasts. Roisin, who followed her intergalactic studies from Ireland and France to Hawaii and New York over the course of decades, spent just as many years trying to make sense of and move beyond an illicit relationship with her cousin Liam. Francois arrived at the base with his own baggage: Severine, his dying mother, had insisted throughout her life that the ghosts of her ancestors are real. Sedgwick tackles a centuries-spanning interconnected narrative by placing each chapter within the context of a comet's appearance in the sky. The sections that chronicle Severine's conversations with her dearly departed are marked by their magical realism, but those that explore Roisin and Liam's star-crossed romance are the standouts, both quietly moving and delicately portrayed. Uniquely structured and stylistically fascinating, the multilayered story comes full circle in a denouement that is both heartbreaking and satisfying. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Comet Seekers." Publishers Weekly, 29 Aug. 2016, p. 61. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462236407&it=r&asid=5b0ae5f50de7d4ec503e1d125d2b0cf4. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462236407
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The Comet Seekers
Kathy Sexton
Booklist.
112.22 (Aug. 1, 2016): p24. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Comet Seekers. By Helen Sedgwick. Oct. 2016.304p. Harper, $25.99 (9780062448767).
When astronomers Franco is and Roisin meet in Antarctica to observe a comet, it feels like they've been connected for decades, both having overcome much to explore the skies. Roisin, we learn, became an astronomer at the cost of losing her first and most intense love, her cousin Liam; meanwhile, Francois is attempting to put his own family history behind him by traveling to Antarctica--only the second time he has left his home in France. Moving backward and forward in time, we follow the separate paths of the two characters, visiting them at the times the comets to which they are both drawn are visible. The universe in all its wonders, Sedgwick suggests, draws these two together just when they need it the most. Readers will be enveloped in the magical world that Sedgwick creates and will grapple with the big issues she tackles--love, family, freedom, and loneliness. Those who are drawn to intimate stories of family drama are sure to respond to this beautiful, character-driven novel, which is reminiscent of the work of Amy Bloom and Elizabeth Strout.--Kathy Sexton
Sexton, Kathy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sexton, Kathy. "The Comet Seekers." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 24. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460761624&it=r&asid=209fd493cbda4a28cb54f1fee708313a. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460761624
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Writ in the Stars
Library Journal.
141.13 (Aug. 1, 2016): p80. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Sedgwick, Helen. The Comet Seekers HarperCollins. Oct. 2016.304p. ISBN 9780062448767. $25.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062448781. F
A literary editor and former physicist, British writer and debut novelist Sedgwick weaves science and the imagination into a melancholy yet magical tale of long-departed souls who won't rest until they can impose their will upon their living relations. In a narrative spanning centuries and continents, from France to Ireland to Antarctica, the spirits materialize with the appearance of historic comets. Protagonist Roisin has always been captivated by the night sky; as a kid in Ireland, she and younger cousin Liam would lie in the fields each night while she taught him about the constellations, hoping to glimpse a comet. Years later they become lovers, but Liam knows he cannot hold on to the peripatetic Roisfn, now an astronomer who longs to see the world. In Bayeux, France, a young chef, Francois, is also afflicted with wanderlust. But can he leave his mother while she's hearing voices and showing signs of dementia? When Francois and Roisln finally meet at a scientific outpost in Antarctica, is it fate that causes them inexplicably to recognize each other or the machinations of the ancestors trying to right wrongs from centuries past? VERDICT Readers would do well to suspend disbelief and open their hearts to the romance, the lush prose, and the mystery of Sedgwick's original and inventive debut. [See Prepub Alert, 4/3/16.]--Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
* Pipkin, John. The Blind Astronomer's Daughter. Bloomsbury USA. Oct. 2016.464p. ISBN 9781632861870. $28; ebk. ISBN 9781632861887. F
For Arthur Ainsworth, the Great Comet of 1744 marked an end and a beginning: the end of his family, killed by smallpox, and the launch of a life spent scouring the heavens in search of celestial bodies to name after his loved ones, and searching for connections. Oddly enough, it is the distant stars that bring him a "family": an orphaned girl, both daughter and assistant, who carries on his work; a talented blacksmith who builds his telescope; and even his rival William Herschel, who discovered and named the planet that Ainsworth sought for his own memorializing. Pipkin's (Woodsburner) exquisitely crafted historical novel offers readers many things: a sensitive recounting of Ireland's travails as its impoverished populace struggles to feed and clothe itself, a riveting description of the passion of discovery in the late 18th century, and a brilliant examination of such age-old themes as the longing for permanence and belonging. VERDICT A pleasurable read for lovers of historical fiction and for those longing for reassurance that
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following one's passion does indeed lead to healing and belonging--Cynthia Johnson, formerly with Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, MA
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Writ in the Stars." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 80. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459804967&it=r&asid=7e4454425c3d4f3c58a395d48d4ccee1. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459804967
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5/8/17, 9)47 AM
Ghostly
Andrea Barrett
The New York Times Book Review.
(Dec. 4, 2016): Arts and Entertainment: p31(L). From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Barrett, Andrea. "Ghostly." The New York Times Book Review, 4 Dec. 2016, p. 31(L). PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472545736&it=r&asid=9830e1615f8514316b7afb8e6c4fa994. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472545736
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"The Comet Seekers." Publishers Weekly, 29 Aug. 2016, p. 61. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462236407&it=r. Accessed 8 May 2017. Sexton, Kathy. "The Comet Seekers." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 24. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460761624&it=r. Accessed 8 May 2017. "Writ in the Stars." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 80. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459804967&it=r. Accessed 8 May 2017. Barrett, Andrea. "Ghostly." The New York Times Book Review, 4 Dec. 2016, p. 31(L). PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472545736&it=r. Accessed 8 May 2017.

• Kirkus Reviews
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/helen-sedgwick/the-comet-seekers/
  Word count: 412

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  KIRKUS REVIEW
  Haunted characters struggle to find fulfillment.

  In her ambitious but flawed debut novel, journalist, editor, and former research physicist Sedgwick leaps through time, from 1066 to the present, following the trajectories of her characters’ lives as various comets surge gloriously through the night skies. She focuses on four main characters: cousins Róisín and Liam are star-crossed lovers both because of their consanguinity and their unbridgeable differences. Róisín, an astronomer, wants to travel the world researching the cosmos; Liam is committed to staying on his family’s farm. The second pair is a mother and son, Severine and François. Even as a child, François longed to explore far-off places, from South American jungles to Antarctica’s “wild emptiness”; but Severine will not leave their native Bayeux, France, because she is surrounded there by 11 ghosts from her family’s long past. These ghosts are the novel’s liveliest characters: playful, teasing, and so comforting that Severine cannot live without them; they are more crucial to her than François. “Why should she have to choose,” she asks herself, “between her ghosts and her son?” Among the ghosts, Severine is especially attached to her grandmother, “who everyone thought was crazy, who made the world come alive, whose smile made Severine feel special, and loved.” Because Granny’s ghost treats her like a child, Severine seems infantilized—or, maybe, crazy. François can hardly make sense of his strange mother. Rather than allowing her characters to evolve, Sedgwick belabors their predicaments in chapter after chapter. The image of shooting stars suggests a theme: as Róisín explains, “All those stars we see...they’re dead already. They have exploded, rejected everything that they were, and the raw components, the elements they were made of, that is where life comes from.” But this idea of transformation is only barely hinted at, and, except for Severine, the characters persist in sadness.

  Unlike shooting stars, Sedgwick’s yearning protagonists seem unable or unwilling to “shower the world with light.”

  Pub Date: Oct. 11th, 2016
  ISBN: 978-0-06-244876-7
  Page count: 304pp
  Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
  Review Posted Online: July 19th, 2016
  Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1st, 2016

• The Scotsman
  http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-the-comet-seekers-by-helen-sedgwick-1-4214953
  Word count: 836

  Book review: The Comet Seekers by Helen Sedgwick Helen Sedgwicks characters tend to tell, not show. Picture: Contributed STUART KELLY 12:07Sunday 28 August 2016 0 HAVE YOUR SAY Helen Sedgwick’s debut novel reaches for the stars but eventually comes crashing to earth, writes Stuart Kelly The Comet Seekers by Helen Sedgwick | Harvill Secker, 290pp, £12.99 We have had Magic Realism and Dirty Realism and Hysterical Realism; so here comes the next wave: Mimsical Realism. If Magic Realism was Houdini, Mimsical Realism is Paul Daniels. It’s a genre so devoid of intent, desire and jeopardy that it resembles a fly-wheel without a gear. It spins and spins and engages with nothing. The Comet Seekers is emblematic of this new genre. It has a conceit, and is conceited. The plot concerns two people, Róisín and François. The cluster of diacritics on their names already seems a sign of more ornamentation then architecture. Róisín is Irish which means that all her relatives say “grand”, “to be sure” and “so it is” on a regular basis. François, being French, has to hear his relatives speak in English the whole time with the exception of a merde or grand-mère or “pas possible” to remind us they are French. The novel opens and closes with them both in Antarctica, watching a comet. It then fills in the various and variegated backstories, but this cuts the Achilles’ tendon of the novel in a way: we know at the outset where Róisín and François will end up. Róisín has always been obsessed with the stars, and with her cousin Liam, who is trying to manage a failing farm. She looks up, he looks down – symbolism, geddit? François is stuck with his mother, Severine, who has the capacity to see ghosts from her family. These are strange ghosts. They fade out as ghosts tend to do, but we are told that “Great-Grandpa Paul-François… is having too much fun trying on Severine’s mother’s hats”. Can these ghosts interact with our reality or not? Given that part of the plot involves François’s scepticism about his mother’s time with the spirits, couldn’t she just have said “come in here and look, there’s hats flying around”? The connection between the two principal characters is the comets. Apparently the ghosts only come out when there is a comet blazing in the sky. It means we get even more back-stories, as the psychic link to the comet stretches back to 1066 and the Bayeux Tapestry, so we get in-set moments of the times the comets have passed beforehand. Now, there have been several excellent novels which try to weld the short story to the novel: Tom Bullough’s Addlands, Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff, Sara Taylor’s The Shore, and the origin of then all – Felipe Alfau’s Locos. This tries to capture that extensive sense the “stories as novel” might provide, but since we do not care about the principal characters, we do not care about their histories. They seem like the DVD extras you never watch. The scientific material does not combine well with the airy-fairy flim-flam. If the entire point is that “the universe is pretty miraculous… and that is not something she wants to get lost among the detail”, then I’m sorry but I would like some detail other than a few paragraphs about binary stars and black holes. It seems to me very strange that contemporary Scottish literature has moved towards whimsy rather than urgency, to speaking for not speaking out, to spiralling into its own fantasies rather than grappling with reality in all its surrealism. It is as if all our novels now aspire to be Amélie and nobody wants to be Delicatessen. There is a dreadful externality to the characters – we are told what they feel, but struggle to glimpse them feeling it. They twitch like marionettes throughout. I have frequently said that all books have their own critical secret within them. In The Comet Seekers it is sorrowfully clear. “It’s like a fairy tale, New York, one sprinkled with a harsh reality but full of more surprises than she’d imagined”. Although the jacket cover tells us that the author has a Distinction in Creative Writing, it seems like she missed the lesson on “Show, Not Tell”. Time and again as I read about Róisín and François one question kept niggling at me: what is the purpose of this? There is tragedy and there is comedy, there is elegy and there is ecstasy. In the end, though, I felt it without purpose, a book which has some eloquent writing in it, and some engaging ideas, but is, in the end, a sugary confection of a novel; fey enough, but lacking substance, and with the hint of something calculatedly twee behind it all.

  Read more at: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-the-comet-seekers-by-helen-sedgwick-1-4214953

• Washington Independent Review of Books
  http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/the-comet-seekers-a-novel
  Word count: 800

  The Comet Seekers: A Novel
  By Helen Sedgwick Harper 304 pp.
  Reviewed by Fatima Azam
  December 10, 2016
  Unconventional structure aside, this story of family turmoil — and family secrets — has much to recommend it.

  In order to fully appreciate The Comet Seekers, you must discard all expectations of what a novel should be. A conventional reading cannot be applied to Helen Sedgwick’s debut.

  The form of the novel fights against this sort of reading from the first page. As the story begins, scenes are offered in short bursts, a technique that continues throughout. Readers are not given a chance to sit back and be taken in by the beauty of the words, descriptions, or emotions, all of which are rare in this text. Instead, they’re shown flashing images and abrupt scenes — akin to a person going through a box of loosely connected Polaroids.

  The novel is an amalgamation of myriad vignettes, each one tied to the other, but each allowing the reader a mere glimpse, a surface look, at the pieces of history that make up a character’s life and that link them with others in the world.

  The novel opens with Róisín and François in Antarctica with a team waiting for the appearance of a comet. At this point, these two are nearly cardboard cutouts, two-dimensional characters that are simply acting out predetermined parts. As readers, we do not have any connections to them, nor does it seem that the novel invites us to form any. We don’t care, not really, that François’ mother has passed away while he sits, isolated, at the tip of the world.

  Furthermore, we care little for why Róisín feels guilty or misses someone named Liam. At this point, the writing keeps readers at a distance, not even allowing them entirely into conversations (there are no quotation marks in the novel). Perhaps Sedgwick does not want readers to be empathetic, at least not before they are aware of the characters’ backgrounds.

  Here is where the novel shows off Sedgwick’s skill at weaving not so much a story as a rich backstory, an in-depth history. Slowly, the novel reveals events and circumstances that eventually lead Róisín and François to Antarctica. Scenes are thrown at the reader, leaving them to fit the puzzle pieces together until finally the novel ends up right back where it began. Now, we care.

  Yet these characters and the loose plot serve more as props for the moral of this work: Family is always a part of us, but if we allow that bond to overwhelm us, it may lead to the death of imagination, freedom, and, as the book shows over and over again, ourselves. Unlike most contemporary novels, Sedgwick’s work seems more focused on giving us evidence of the grave consequences one faces if one tries to forget lineage altogether or attempts to hold on too tight.

  However, as elegantly as the novel builds upon this theme, some issues are present. Its scope doesn’t extend past one particular family. A wider view, with varied cultural, national, and religious backgrounds, would have made it more intriguing and lent depth to the theme. Which brings up another issue.

  The Comet Seekers focuses on the Irish Róisín and the French François. But these two characters may as well be Rosy from Duluth and Frank from Hoboken. The few French words in the text seem like throwaways, plugged in as an afterthought to remind readers who’s from where. Why choose a cast of French and Irish characters and then make them interchangeable?

  More troubling is the incest that occurs in the book. It’s not that it exists in the narrative, but that it seems pointless to the story. Furthermore, the reasons the novel provides for its existence are far from satisfying and, at times, inexplicable.

  Yet even with these minor faults, the trajectory of the book remains impressive as it is fabricated to match the trajectory of a comet, particularly one like Halley, with its ability to return to the same point in the sky. Much like the notion of human lives following trajectories, repeating similar histories across time and space, in different bodies, over and over again.

  Fatima Azam is working on her Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Maryland while also teaching English writing and literature. She resides in Maryland, where she is working on her fifth novel. She loves words almost as much as chocolate pastries.

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• The Skinny UK
  http://www.theskinny.co.uk/books/features/comet-seekers-helen-sedgwick
  Word count: 1268

  Helen Sedgwick on The Comet Seekers
  Jenni Ajderian | 21 Sep 2016
  5 0 0
  In her acclaimed and inventive debut novel, Helen Sedgwick lights up the lives of characters through the ages by the trail of the great comets. She offers more traditional insight into The Comet Seekers by speaking to The Skinny

  It all started with the Bayeux Tapestry. “On one of the borders there’s an embroidery of a woman, who is staring out at the viewer in this very proud way,” explains Helen Sedgwick, author of The Comet Seekers. “And beside her there’s a cleric; he’s reaching out and he might be touching her face or he might be trying to hit her, it’s not quite clear. There’s a bit of writing alongside it that says ‘Aelfgifu and a certain cleric’ so people think that maybe it was a scandal of the time. I thought how fascinating that [there is] this woman – who is given a name, and who looks so out of place and very modern, so defiant. So I thought I had to create a story for her.”

  That story was one of many serendipitous flash fictions that Sedgwick wrote and wove together to make a short story, published back in 2012. Each piece came from a completely different time and place, moving from France in 1066 to a research base in the Arctic Circle, back to a powerful and fearless woman building her own house in the 15th century and forward again to chase childhood sweethearts through Irish fields.

  “When I originally wrote them it was a sort of experiment; I wanted to write a short story composed of lots of different flash fictions that seemed unconnected, but by the end, the connecting factor would appear. And the connecting factor was the comets.”

  She then embellished this initial outline, filling in extra pieces of life and pulling out more and more stories from the people along her timeline to create The Comet Seekers. Only ever seeing her characters when a comet is in the sky, we are left with great gaps in the timeline that help to retain that feeling of the short story – the impression that there is a lot going on, that there is a whole world here, we just can’t see into it right now.

  Since the early days of astronomy we’ve been tracking these heavenly bodies as they pass by: some return years or millennia later; others shoot past us without so much as slowing down. It is these fleeting glimpses and this orbital motion that serve as central themes to Sedgwick’s debut novel: a patient and moving love story between earth and stars.

  We spend a good deal of the book staring at the sky with Roisín, who follows her passion for astronomy all around the world in a series of academic posts. Sedgwick’s own background as a research physicist helped to shape this, but the detail comes more from her amateur interest in astronomy: “My research was between engineering, biology and chemistry; the astronomy has been an interest of mine but not related to my career at all. It’s just something that I’ve been interested in since I was very young.”

  Sedgwick has spoken and written about how both scientific research and creative writing require creativity, intensity and a lot of dedication – things which could conceivably be disrupted by moving around a lot. “Jobs that are really interesting generally do take a long time,” Sedgwick explains, from her own experience, “In my own life I’ve had these careers that certainly take a long time, and yet I’ve moved from one to the other.” Sedgwick moved from lab work to a Masters in Creative Writing, and ever since has worked in the literary and artistic world. “I’ve got a bit of me that wants to be dedicated to one subject, but I think I am quite a reckless person in a way, I want to be exploring all the time and doing new things all the time.”

  While evaluating this conflict, real or imagined, between dedication to one thing and desire to do others, Sedgwick wanted to explore the choices we make and the reasons we make them, without ever holding one route up as the ideal. “I wanted all of the characters to prioritise different aspects of their lives, and see how that played out for them individually.”

  These choices made by characters in their pairs or on their own create a tension that is all too familiar – how do we cope with loss and heartbreak? How much can we factor in friends, family and lovers when choosing how to live and what to do with our lives? The latter can sound like a very modern problem, but in The Comet Seekers we see families decide to part or remain together again and again over a thousand years, from Aelfgifu and the tapestry up to the present day.

  “If anything, I think in our past there was a great deal of travel; people would have formed family groups that moved together. Travel is easier than it’s ever been before, but in a way that makes it less real. In the past we would have been walking, we would have been experiencing travel in such a different way, and I think that’s where the longing for travel comes from.”

  Throughout history, the choice to stay in the family home or go out into the world was not available to everyone. Certainly Aelfgifu, living and dying around 1066, would not have had as many options as her cleric, and the effect of gender on our choices was one that Sedgwick was keen to explore. While our physicist Roisín gives in to the wanderlust and makes her way from the Irish fields of her childhood to an Arctic research base, Severine, living in present-day Bayeux, feels incapable of leaving because of her fading ties with her own family.

  “There’s an obligation that so many women feel, and so often they find themselves at the centre of a family, holding the family together.”

  For Severine, this family is a strange one: ghosts of the departed who Sedgwick intentionally writes as ambiguous and lovable. She says that, for Severine, staying in one place is “rooted in both love and obligation. I wanted to explore that and show how she is both really frustrated and also incredibly grateful for the people around her.”

  Just as Aelfgifu has moved between fact and fiction, and the comets themselves appear and disappear almost as apparitions, Severine’s ghosts also bring us to questions about reality itself. “Human beings do use imagination to cope with a lot of things, and when you’ve lost someone you keep talking to them in your head. You can imagine what they would say in certain circumstances, and in a way they’re still very real to you.”

  Seeing the unseen, or waiting for it to return, is a talent that all of Sedgwick’s principal characters possess, and it’s what they choose to do with that knowledge that draws out the thread of the story over the centuries. Built on flash fictions and short stories, the finished piece is full of life: languorous, homely, fleeting and heavily affected by its past.

  The Comet Seekers is out now, published by Vintage, RRP £12.99

• Wales Arts Review
  http://www.walesartsreview.org/fiction-the-comet-seekers-by-helen-sedgwick/
  Word count: 1200

  BOOKS | THE COMET SEEKERS BY HELEN SEDGWICK
  It is not uncommon for children to draw maps. But Róisín, in Helen Sedgwick’s debut novel The Comet Seekers, is an uncommon child who draws maps of the night-time sky, for:

  Why draw a square house with a triangular roof when you can draw the patterns in the stars?

  Even though we may travel across the world by plane, most of us are such earthbound creatures. Only when there is an event like the Perseid meteor showers do we think of looking up at the night sky. Those so-called shooting stars which we have just recently had the chance to see are not stars at all, but debris from one of the many comets which orbit elliptically around our Sun, drawn down by the Earth’s gravitational pull as we cross the comet’s orbit.

  The action of The Comet Seekers is delineated by the orbits of some of the comets in our solar system, and by what happens when they make a close enough approach to Earth to be seen. At the age of nine Róisín watches Comet West with her younger cousin Liam in her home in Ireland. As children they make a small hut in the wood for adventures; they return to it as teenagers for a different kind of exploration. But their ambitions are different; Liam stays to work on the family farm when Róisín moves away to follows her childhood ambition of becoming an astrophysicist, wanting:

  …the promise of a bigger world, a cosmos, an expanding universe. She’s too tall to lie in an island hut forever.

  But, as comets return on their orbits, so does Róisín, though only to depart again and again on her journey, constantly seeking something, as her father did before her.

  In a parallel story, two countries and two channels away in the northern French town of Bayeux, Severine is growing up with her mother and her grandmother and seeing the same comets. When the comets return so do her ancestors, ghosts visible and audible to her granny, but not to Severine as a child. Ten years later, as Halley’s Comet is in the sky, she learns from her dying granny what she has to do to see and talk to the ghosts herself. The price she has to pay is to stay in Bayeux, and when the comets come so will Great-Grandpa Paul-François, Uncle Antoine, Henri from the 1750s and others, all with stories to tell, all precious to her as members of her family.

  Severine and Liam, in their separate orbits, are those who stay put, although they are both drawn by the night sky. Severine’s son François and Liam’s cousin Róisín are the ones who travel, and as they do so their orbits cross, in Bayeux, in Scotland and eventually, much further afield. Helen Sedgwick stitches the fabric of the stories of all four together very neatly, crossing from one to another seamlessly within the framework of the visiting comets. Her own background as a research physicist has informed her writing hugely; there is a lot of scientific detail sewn into the stories, but never so that it slows the action or becomes impenetrable.

  In times past, before planetary motion was understood, the periodic passage through the night sky of fast-moving bodies with bright tails was often viewed as a bad omen. There was such an occurrence in 1066 before the Battle of Hastings. The comet which we now know to be Halley’s Comet – named after the astronomer who in 1705 published his computation of its orbit – is stitched boldly into the Bayeux tapestry, above the figure of the ill-fated King Harold of England. In The Comet Seekers Severine’s son François has grown up familiar the tapestry, but it is only when his mama asks him to take her to see it before he leaves home for what will be the last time that he notices there something she points out to him. It is the stitched image of a mysterious woman called Ælfgifu, who looks like Severine herself. She is one of the ghosts his mama had talked about, a girl who loved a soldier boy.

  The stories of most of the ghosts are fleshed out in snatches. It is enough and not too much to distract from the stories of the living characters in the novel. There is one ghost though, Brigitte, who is troubled. Each time she returns she is consumed, as she was in life, by a fire. She is distressed about what she fears happened to her son and is, as it turns out, a pivotal character in the denouement of the book.

  Helen Sedgwick’s prose writing is beautifully clear. This is a novel you could take as a holiday read while travelling and enjoy its easy-reading style. That is not to disparage it. You could equally return to it at home in winter evenings and take more time to appreciate the ways in which the author has used the background of the comets to explore the nuances of human relationships, the tensions between family attachments and the desire of individuals to make discoveries for themselves and the sadnesses which ensue.

  For example, when she is in Edinburgh during her twenties, trying to reconcile herself to a relationship with Liam as cousins and no more, Róisín is watching Comet Shoemaker-Levy, which is expected to explode dramatically in the atmosphere of Jupiter. This turns out to be a slower process than expected:

  She was expecting fireworks, a series of bright explosions like timpani in light, but she should have realised that destruction takes time; that damage lingers on the surface before leaving a lasting impression.

  The arrival in Edinburgh at the same time of Severine and her young son is for me a slightly forced co-incidence, but this is one of the difficulties of bringing together two apparently separate stories, and is only a slight niggle. There are a few others – music choices which seem to be those of the author rather than the characters, and perhaps an over-insistence on the significance of the colour red and of memories of particular foods from childhood. But these quibbles are vastly outweighed by the satisfactions of reading The Comet Seekers. Helen Sedgwick never overdoes description, but includes small, telling touches such as at Liam’s father’s funeral, where:

  There’s a hotel restaurant with crustless sandwiches and tablecloths of navy blue

  and when a distant relative shakes Liam’s hand:

  It leaves a smudge of butter cream on his thumb.

  The novel captures wonderfully the vastness of the space and time within which its characters – and all of us – live, and poignantly conveys the experience of human loss, the simple but profound compensations of family connections, and the twin pulls of adventure and home.

  Harvill Secker, 304pp, £12.99

• The Irish Times
  http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-comet-seekers-review-the-patterns-in-the-stars-1.2771924
  Word count: 986

  The Comet Seekers review: The patterns in the stars
  Helen Sedgwick’s engaging debut, set in rural Ireland, maps out a constellation of lives over centuries

  The Comet Seekers: Helen Sedgwick was a physicist before turning her hand to writing. Her debut maps the big questions on an even larger plane
  The Comet Seekers: Helen Sedgwick was a physicist before turning her hand to writing. Her debut maps the big questions on an even larger plane
  Sarah Gilmartin

  Mon, Aug 29, 2016, 12:55
  First published:
  Sat, Aug 27, 2016, 05:00

  BUY NOW

  Book Title:
  The Comet Seekers
  ISBN-13:
  9781910701744
  Author:
  Helen Sedgwick
  Publisher:
  Harvill Secker
  Guideline Price:
  £12.99
  ‘Things shifted while he wasn’t looking at the ground and now the world is different; everything is beautiful, and wild, and precarious, because now he knows how the sky can change.”
  While watching a comet light up the darkness of rural Ireland a young boy experiences his first kiss. It is “the sweet, soft kiss of children, of cousins and best friends”.
  Explosions are going off from the beginning of Helen Sedgwick’s debut novel, The Comet Seekers, but the author is firmly in charge of the volume.
  Her laconic tone and measured prose belie the novel’s dramatic content, which in lesser hands could be salacious. In a book that covers centuries – through the clever narrative device of using comets to see into characters’ lives – and two main stories, the one with the Irish backdrop is the most engaging.
  Nine-year-old Róisín is an aspiring astronomer from rural Ireland, a child whose head is in the clouds. Her seven-year-old cousin Liam, who has recently lost his mother, follows Róisín around the farm on her star-gazing adventures. Their contained world is beautifully related by Sedgwick, gaining the reader’s sympathy from the off. When their love turns sexual as teenagers, there is a complexity to their relationship that will leave many rooting for them.
  A second, less compelling and at times repetitive narrative is set in Bayeux, in France, and looks at a family haunted by the ghosts of their ancestors. Severine, a new mother, is the most recent member to be visited, after her beloved grandmother dies. The choice she has to make – to always remain in Bayeux and help her ancestors to navigate their pasts, or to travel the world as she wishes with her son François – causes constant turmoil. While her son encourages her to move on, Severine is beholden to the ghosts: “You are offered a chance to see someone you love again. Is that even a choice?”
  The Comet Seekers opens with François and Róisín meeting as adults on an astronomy mission to Antarctica.
  Short chapters subsequently loop back over their lives and the lives of their ancestors to see what brought them together. These chapters are headed by various comets, their paths reaching back centuries.
  Connections between strangers down through the ages is a central theme. “You go back far enough and you can see that everyone in the world is family,” as François notes when he has a sense of deja vu about red-haired Róisín.
  Sedgwick is a highly evocative writer who makes excellent use of nature to showcase her themes. It is not just the comets that are falling everywhere we look, with their spectacular deaths “that split and fracture and split again, and one by one the fragments catch fire in the atmosphere of the planet”. Her characters are in turmoil, too, hurling themselves into situations that they know will hurt – but doing so anyway.
  In Róisín she has created an enigmatic and original lead, the kind of girl who wonders, “Why draw a square house with a triangular roof when you can draw the patterns in the stars?”
  As her secret life with Liam threatens to fester, Róisín takes off on her astronomy travels, leaving a lonesome and pitiable man behind. His pleas that “the ground is just as important as the sky” bring her back, but the restless adventurer within wins out.
  Róisín wants to spend her life “with people who are driven to explore the world, not those who are willing to follow”. It is a moment of quiet revelation that will have consequences.
  In this, and in its setting and themes, it recalls the work of Donal Ryan. Danielle McLaughlin is another who comes to mind. Sedgwick shares the Cork writer’s ability to mine the atmosphere for sparkly nuggets.
  Much of her space talk is metaphorical: “Our sun is on its own, but a lot of stars come in pairs, and orbit each other . . . Sometimes material from one of the stars gets sucked into its partner, so one gets bigger and bigger and one smaller and smaller”.
  The author’s eye is also drawn to domestic detail, from the loneliness of a new mother who wonders “how the house could feel so empty when there was so much noise” to “a disused water tank that made her ache with its futility”.
  Sedgwick, who has family links to Dublin, was born in Scotland and worked as a research physicist before turning her hand to writing. Her charming debut maps the world’s big questions on an even larger plane.
  Calling to mind those famous lines from The Tempest about the insubstantial pageant of life, Róisín sums it up: “But under all that, there is perhaps a part of her that knows we are too small to matter. Nothing happened, that’s the thing. The universe carried on, the comets kept coming – it made no difference.”
  Sarah Gilmartin is an arts journalist

• Association for Scottish Literary Studies
  http://asls.arts.gla.ac.uk/SWE/TBI/TBIIssue20/Khaskin.html
  Word count: 1211

  Book Review:

  The Comet Seekers by Helen Sedgewick

  Go back to the Book Reviews Index.

  cover image for The Comet Seekers When was the last time you rode a comet?

  This question foregrounds Helen Sedgwick's debut novel The Comet Seekers, and its plot spans a millennium of comets crossing the Earth's sky. Throughout the novel, as the comets fly by, we come across an array of eccentric characters — Great-Grandpa Paul-François and his daughter Granny, Brigitte who builds the house on the outskirts of Bayeux, Adriane who refuses to speak to her dead brother, and many others whose ghostly existence enlivens the pages. But although this dazzling tale of family and love begins in 1066, when Halley's Comet makes its way over the heads of Ælfgifu and her soldier boy, the novel begins and ends with Róisín and François in 2017, with Comet Giacobini passing by.

  Róisín grows up in a small village in Ireland, looking at the stars, striving to know more about them and the great world out there; beside her, her cousin Liam grows up looking at her, swept along by Róisín's energy as he tries to ground himself in the land of his family farm. Lovelorn and fundamentally different, the two are trapped between opposite desires to move and to stay put, to love and to be independent. Across the channel, in the small French town of Bayeux, Severine is caught between her wish to travel the world, and her oath to remain and wait for comets, during whose visitations the countless ghosts of her ancestors appear to speak, play, and reminisce with her. Beside Severine, her son François grows up watching a similitude of madness unfolding before him. Mother and son grow closer and move apart, trying to negotiate a space between them where neither has to compromise their truth. Each one of Sedgwick's characters is meticulously fleshed out — beautiful and flawed, these madwomen and dreamers stare at you from the pages, clamouring to tell their stories, just like Severine's ghosts.

  Sedgwick's more prominent achievements in this novel are her manoeuvring of time and space, as well as her use of vibrant imagery that allows a millennium to seem as a fleeting moment. The novel hops forward and backward in time, playing with the very concept of temporality, tying together a thousand years' worth of interpersonal relationships. Sliding sideways between continents within the same time period, the text dismisses the geographical distance between its characters, further emphasising their emotional estrangement from one another. Powerful imagery recurs throughout, presenting a rich thematic landscape that can only be skimmed in such a short review. The portrayal of gold and red colours on fabric, for example, appears and reappears — as the depiction of a comet in the mysterious Bayeux Tapestry; as the dress sent by the lascivious cleric to Ælfgifu's daughter; as the red tent illuminated by torchlight. The red shawl covering Róisín's shoulders and the golden one covering Severine's, as they live completely disparate lives within mere metres of each other, implicate a connection unfelt except by the reader. The red and gold emerge once and again at intersections of great pain and steadfast perseverance, reflecting the red of spilt blood and shamed cheeks just as much as personal strength. Sedgwick inlays her narrative with exquisite little gems, some easily missed upon the first reading, but all parts of a greater roadmap, just like a map of stars and comets.

  These comets guide the narrative not only as a form of temporal delineation of the scenes, but also through the thematic implication of their association with the ghosts of the novel. Each time a comet blazes through the sky, the ghosts appear, and this reiterated correlation brings forth a simple notion — the ghosts are as real as the comets and just as dead. Each of the apparitions represents a loss, an imprint of someone's beloved long gone, just as each of the comets illuminates a departure, an alienation. Loss seems to be a prerequisite of growth in the novel, as each character loses a partner, a parent, a house, a child, a continent. Loss permeates the pages of the book like a bittersweet perfume, showing us again and again the devastating power of human attachment.

  And yet, in a fine dissonance, Sedgwick's portrayed losses are always accompanied by an equal, if not compensational gain: Severine loses her Granny, but gains an extended family centuries old; Ælfgifu loses her soldier boy, but gains her daughter; Great-Grandpa Paul-François loses himself in a war, but gains a family. This centuries-long game of lost-and-found echoes the greatest truth of the human condition — there is nothing permanent, and great pain will be followed by calm, and joy, followed by more pain. Sedgwick explores difficult issues concerning love, family, and loss, but not without providing the hope — carried by a comet bisecting the sky — that one can always cope.

  With her upward gaze towards the sky and the ancient stars, Sedgwick nonetheless presents an interesting insight into the earthly soul. As one watches Róisín look up and dream about comets and seeing the world, one cannot help but be reminded of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince, whose eventual wish was to go home. It begins to appear as though Róisín and all the other colourful characters, so thoroughly affected by faraway stars, are searching for a home.

  But it is not the entrapment of four walls that they all strive for, far from it. In The Comet Seekers, those who cling to their brick-and-mortar abodes are destined for disappointment — Liam, with his insistence on saving a failing farm, and the angry Brigitte, who had built the family home brick-by-brick, are for the most part too engrained in their soil to find peace. With her creative alacrity, Sedgwick reshapes the concept of home into something extraordinary, bringing to life the old cliché — Home is Where the Heart Is. The text invites you to follow those who follow their hearts to the farthest corners of the earth — to be as happy as Róisín when she wakes up in strange cities on strange lands, as lively as Severine when she plays hide-and-seek with the dearly departed, and as content as François when he engages in culinary creativity in the kitchen with the one he loves. Each of them is truly home not due to their location, but due to their proximity — to themselves, to their families, to their loved ones.

  As with all good books, reading The Comet Seekers is an eye-opening experience urging you to look up into the sky and out of your comfort zone, and seek that which makes you the happiest. It may take you as far as Antarctica or just to your backyard. Regardless, the novel leaves you gazing at the stars and wishes you to be happy, to be kind, and to listen to the voices in your head.

  Valerie Khaskin is an editor and translator.

  The Comet Seekers by Helen Sedgewick is published by Penguin, 2016.

• CultureFly UK
  http://culturefly.co.uk/book-review-the-comet-seekers-by-helen-sedgwick/
  Word count: 689

  BOOK REVIEW: THE COMET SEEKERS BY HELEN SEDGWICK
  MEGAN DAVIESSEPTEMBER 1, 2016BOOK REVIEWSBOOKSFEATURED

  There really is just something so wonderfully romantic about chasing stars, and this is a feeling that The Comet Seekers captures beautifully. When Róisín and François meet at a research station in Antarctica in 2017, they have no way of knowing how 1,000 years of stargazing and lives lived through wars and heartache have led to this exact moment in this exact place at the edge of the Earth.

  It’s a bold premise with a very One Day-esque feel in checking in with these characters only at points in time when a comet can be seen in the sky, but it’s one that’s made possible by the very simple and very logical fact that these comets have been visible on Earth for millennia, so why not use them to mark the passing of time?

  The Comet Seekers therefore starts and ends in 2017, but the time in between slips back to 1976 to 1965 to 1456 and all the way through the years to 1066, the year that started it all, with a comet that has remained embroidered on the Bayeux Tapestry as a reminder for generations. But for all the people and places touched upon, it’s Róisín, François and his mother Severine who provide the core narrative of the novel. Róisín, who grew up in a small Irish village mapping the sky above her and dreaming of exploring the universe, François, who lives in Paris and longs for an adventure he can’t bring himself to go searching for, and Severine, whose head and heart is always firmly with her family – even if that means never leaving Bayeux.

  With this novel, Helen Sedgwick has crafted an incredible story of one truly extraordinary family and all the paths their lives could take. But as with any tale with multiple threads and strands, there are always a few that stand out more, making the weaker threads seem almost lacking in comparison. Róisín and her changing relationship with her cousin, Liam, for example, is an early and strong highlight, tracking the fallout of how Róisín’s need to see the world manages to break free of the tie to her home that Liam represents, resulting in a strained relationship and a pair of broken hearts. The story of Ælfgifu too, brief though it is, who’s caught up in a battle in 1066 and manages to find a moment of romance and happiness with a boy on his way to war, is one I wish had been touched on more as the novel unfolded.the-comet-seekers-coverSeverine and François’ story, meanwhile, is less romantic with François quickly being painted as less a head-in-the-stars and more a feet-firmly-in-reality kind of character, even as a child. The conflicting world views between the pair puts a painful distance between the mother and son, and it all builds towards a conclusion and a speculation that feels a little bit like a cheat when you consider the extent of the people, places and history that came before it.

  Still, none of that prevents The Comet Seekers from being a very, very good novel – because it is, and an elegantly written one at that. This is a story where the lives of these three core characters have been crossing paths in the tiniest of ways for years as they live and love and hope and dream and wait for the next comet to come and light up the night sky. It’s creative and inventive, even if it can be a bit of a slog to get through at times.

  But for all the wading through repetitive ideas and the introduction of one or two characters too many, this novel is as memorable as you hope it will be from the beautiful first line, from its meticulously researched scientific facts through to its ever-present magical realism idealism.

  ★★★

  The Comet Seekers was published by Harvill Secker on 25 August 2016.

• Historical Novel Society
  https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-comet-seekers/
  Word count: 284

  The Comet Seekers
  BY HELEN SEDGWICK

  Find & buy on
  This spellbinding debut novel encompasses the past, present and future of two unexpected lovers whose lives and relationships are intertwined with the passing of great comets overhead. The characters’ complexity and the connections in their lives build as the book slowly gets to its climax.

  The two primary characters first meet on a snowy white expanse of modern Antarctica and are immediately drawn to each other, knowing everything will change for them. They are completely different in personality and past. Older by a few years, scientist Róisín grew up in a tiny village in Ireland with her astronomer father. She is passionate and well suited for surviving and working on the remote base station. François, the chef for the base, has left his birthplace in Bayeux, France, never having been away from home before. They are each longing for a fresh start, their respective reasons for leaving home each tied to tragedy.

  Time and its complexity are the book’s most magical elements. The destinies of the two lovers are shown by the glimpses of the past and future, the celestial visitation of comets, and the ghostly, almost watchful presence of their ancestors. The novel’s main story is contemporary, but each chapter provides a historical vignette going back as early as the 11th century.

  Sedgwick’s style is demonstrative and tactile, with the sweet, casual poeticism of haiku. A skillfully crafted, and emotionally perceptive novel that gives the reader a chance to explore the choices we make, the connections we miss, and the ties that inextricably join our fates.

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