It’s 1965. On a small island in the South Pacific, a group of astronomers gather to witness the passing of a comet, but when a young boy dies during a meteor shower, the lives of the scientists and their loved ones change in subtle yet profound ways.Three exceptional women are at the centre of the group and all three make choices early in their lives that echo and return – like the comet above them – over a quarter of a century.Andrew Sean Greer’s remarkable and sweeping novel is an exploration of chances taken and lost, of love found and broken, and of time’s gravitational pull on the lives of everyday and extraordinary people.‘If more of us looked at the world the way Andrew Sean Greer does, we might be a little less eager to cheapen and destroy it. His vision is clear, his heart true; in his fiction, as in Virginia Woolf’s, even misery glows with an almost unearthly light.’ J. Robert Lennon, author of The Light of Falling Stars.