The Actual Star

A Novel

By: Monica Byrne

Narrated by: Carolina Hoyos, Kareem Ferguson, Gisela Chipe

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas meets Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, as acclaimed author Monica Byrne (The Girl in the Road) crafts an unforgettable piece of speculative fiction about where humanity came from, where we are now, and where we’re going—and how, in every age, the same forces that drive us apart also bind us together.

""A stone-cold masterpiece.""—New Scientist

The Actual Star takes readers on a journey over two millennia and six continents—telling three powerful tales a thousand years apart, all of them converging in the same cave in the Belizean jungle.

Braided together are the stories of a pair of teenage twins who ascend the throne of a Maya kingdom; a young American woman on a trip of self-discovery in Belize; and two dangerous charismatics vying for the leadership of a new religion, racing toward a confrontation that will determine the fate of the few humans left on Earth after massive climate change.

In each era, a reincarnated trinity of souls navigates the entanglements of tradition and progress, sister and stranger, and love and hate—until all of their age-old questions about the nature of existence converge deep underground, where only in complete darkness can they truly see.

maybe I'm daft, but I did not get how it ended

It took some time to get into it with the jumping around, but it was good. And then it ended. It didn't seem like an end. It didn't make much sense. Maybe I'm to empirically minded to get it.

Friggin weird

I don’t know what this is but I’m gonna listen again before I reestablish time and space

masterpiece time spanning epic

masterpiece is the best word I can come. it ties together 3 different epochs past present and future as if they were intimately connected through the timeless non-western mythos of the mayan worldview and calendar

Best Audio Book So Far

The three eras of this book were so well delivered by the voices of three artists. Their characterizations did honor to this excellently crafted novel by Monica Byrne. I read the book first, then listed to this audio book with my spouse.

Echoes of Cloud Atlas

Rich, provocative and fully realized. It was a slow start for me, but I really into it a third way through, leaving me with a lot of deeply mined themes to reflect on.