The Prettiest Star

One of 2020’s most acclaimed books. Winner of the Southern Book Prize * Winner of the Weatherford Award * A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of 2020 * One of O Magazine’s Best LGBT Books of 2020 * * One of the Women’s National Book Association’s 2020 Great Group Reads Selections * EW’s 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2020 * BookRiot * Lambda Literary’s * Salon * BookPage’s * Garden & Gun’s * Logo NewNowNext’s

In this “brutally fresh kind of homecoming novel,” (Entertainment Weekly) Brian Jackson returns to his small Appalachian hometown and the family who rejected him. Carter Sickels’s stunning literary achievement “deserves a place in the canon of AIDS literature alongside the likes of Larry Kramer and Rebecca Makkai” (Los Angeles Review of Books).

The story of Brian’s return to small-town Ohio is told in a chorus of voices: Brian’s mother Sharon; his fourteen-year-old sister, Jess, as she grapples with her brother’s mysterious return; and the video diaries Brian makes to document his final summer. Written in prose that seeks “to answer without flinching away from ugliness and without demonizing the ignorant” (Salon), The Prettiest Star offers an urgent portrait of a family in the center of a national crisis, in order to tell a unique story about the politics and fragility of the body, and to explore the bounds of family and redemption.