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Resoundingly praised as "brilliantly labyrinthine" (Publishers Weekly), "a dazzling epic" (Time Out New York), and "the ultimate treasure--the gift of a thoughtful story, told with intelligence and immeasurable heart" (The Denver Post), A Trip to the Stars is a rare and astonishing novel. Nicholas Christopher masterfully weaves threads of magic, mysticism, classicism, science, and history into a spellbinding saga illuminating the power of love and destiny.

At a Manhattan planetarium in 1965, a ten-year-old boy called Loren is kidnapped from his young adoptive aunt, Alma. The event profoundly changes the rest of their lives. Told through their alternating voices, A Trip to the Stars charts the paths of Loren and Alma over the next fifteen years, as they search for each other and in the process, discover themselves.                    

When he is whisked away by strangers, Loren at first believes he has been mistaken for another child. But his abductor turns out to a blood relative--his great-uncle Junius Samax, a wealthy reformed gambler. To his even greater surprise, Loren learns his "real name" is Enzo. 

Growing up in a lavish converted Las Vegas hotel, Loren is surrounded by a priceless collection of art and antiques, and a host of eccentric guests--including experts on Atlantis, Zuni occultism, vampires, and other mysteries of the universe. Slowly, he pieces together the truth about his mother, and the complicated history that led to his adoption shortly before her death. He also battles a malicious woman, with hidden ties to both his birth parents. Although he still thinks about his aunt far away, Enzo is lulled by the belief that she knows he is safe.   

But in New York, Alma is devastated by Loren's disappearance. After months of frantic, fruitless searching, she stops and starts striving to escape the past. Changing her name to Mala-- the word for "bad" in Latin, Spanish, and Italian--she gets a car and drives as far as New Orleans. After a stint working for an arachnologist, she volunteers for duty in Vietnam--a war she opposes. Trained as an X-ray technician and assigned to the Navy Nurse Corps, she keeps to herself and mourns for Loren. On Christmas day, the unexpected happens. Mala meets Geza Cassiel--a striking Air Force captain with the strange outline of a key in his stomach. Immediately, they are drawn to one another. Yet just as Mala opens her heart, Geza too vanishes. Devastated again, Mala begins a restless ten-year journey, moving from island to island around the globe, seeking for some way to overcome her losses.                                                   

Seamlessly fusing fantasy, scholarship, and suspense, A Trip to the Stars follows Enzo and Mala across a vast landscape--with stops in the Mojave Desert, Greece, North Africa, the South Pacific, and Hawaii--and through harrowing and electrifying events.  At every step, Christopher tantalizes with dark secrets, breathtaking coincidences, psychic revelations, celestial influences, and the converging forces of fate and chance. 

Christopher builds a story of tremendous scope as he traces the intricate latticework of Mala and Loren's lives. Each remains separate from the other, but both are tied in ways they cannot imagine -- until the final, miraculous chapter of this extraordinary novel comes to an end.       

A Trip to the Stars is, ultimately, the story of how Enzo discovers his true identity and how Mala discovers her true self. Bound by a legacy of family secrets, a pair of precious celestial pendants, the bite of a star-gazing spider, and their mutual connection to an astronaut, Enzo and Mala stand as testaments to the persistence and wonder of love. In the words of Susan Dooley in Washington Post Book World:  "Christopher is a writer of remarkable gifts."

Reviews

"A large, lavishly inventive novel...An American descendant of The Arabian Nights -- and as such it's thoroughly satisfying. An erudite and artful entertainment."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Christopher is North America's García Márquez; Borges with emotional weight...This is one of those rare books that, by connecting the stars, catches you in its web."
--Toronto Globe and Mail

"Spellbinding...the ultimate treasure -- the gift of a thoughtful story, told with intelligence and immeasurable heart."
--The Denver Post

"Christopher is a writer of remarkable gifts; he weaves fascinating and esoteric material into a story where such diversions never seem out of place."
--The Washington Post Book World

"This labyrinthine novel…is animated by an encompassing lust for beauty…Christopher…offers us an alluringly baroque vision of hedonism - the American dream run wild. --The New Yorker

Read the opening pages of A Trip to the Stars

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