The Comet Seekers: A Novel

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HarperCollins, Oct 11, 2016 - Fiction - 304 pages

A timeless love story and a magical, intoxicating debut for readers of The Miniaturist and The Time Traveler's Wife.

From a remote research base in Antarctica to witch burnings in Bayeux, The Comet Seekers is a romantic, mesmerizing love story about two strangers who find themselves connected by the passing of the great comets overhead and haunted by the ancestors who bind them together.

Roisin and François are strangers—or so they think—when they meet on the frozen ice sheets of Antarctica as Comet Giacobini fractures overhead. Both are compelled to explore the world but to do so both have left family behind. 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.

As the story moves back through the centuries to reveal the lives of their ancestors—from an accused witch to a young woman desperately embroidering Halley’s Comet onto the Bayeux Tapestry—it shows how strangers can be connected and ghosts can be real, and how the way we choose to see the world can be as tragic or as beautiful as the comets themselves.

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About the author (2016)

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.

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