NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR FOR 2024 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“For the sake of knowing, of understanding, Wandering Stars blew my heart into a thousand pieces and put it all back together again. This is a masterwork that will not be forgotten, a masterwork that will forever be part of you.” —Morgan Talty, bestselling author of Night of the Living Rez
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle,where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.
In a novel that is by turns shattering and wondrous, Tommy Orange has conjured the ancestors of the family readers first fell in love with in There There—warriors, drunks, outlaws, addicts—asking what it means to bethe children and grandchildren of massacre. Wandering Stars is a novel about epigenetic and generational trauma that has the force and vision of a modern epic, an exceptionally powerful new book from one of the most exciting writers at work today and soaring confirmation of Tommy Orange’s monumental gifts.
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2 books in catalog
Contemporary fiction depicting urban Native American life gained a landmark voice with multi-generational stories examining identity, historical trauma, and community resilience in Oakland, California. Tommy Orange, an enrolled citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, emerged on the literary scene with a polyphonic narrative approach that gives voice to Native individuals navigating city life away from reservations.
Through deeply interconnected characters and multi-layered histories, his novels address the legacy of government assimilation policies, addiction, and cultural survival while connecting historical atrocities directly to modern urban realities.
Born on January 19, 1982, in Oakland, California, Orange grew up in the city's Dimond District in a biracial family with a Cheyenne and Arapaho father and a white mother. He did not fall in love with reading until his mid-twenties, when he worked at an Indian Center in Oakland and discovered commonalities among urban Native peoples. He went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he subsequently served on the faculty teaching creative writing.
His literary career took off with the publication of his debut novel, There There, in 2018, which achieved bestseller status and received widespread critical recognition. In addition to his fiction writing, Orange acts as a public speaker for universities, libraries, and colleges, discussing craft, writing processes, and Native American history. In October 2025, Orange was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in recognition of his contributions to literature.
Orange's literary style relies heavily on polyphonic structure, utilizing alternating perspective chapters that weave together diverse personal narratives into a broader collective chorus. His prose candidly explores urban Native identity, addressing personal and family experiences with addiction, dislocation, and recovery. By focusing on Oakland's Native community, his work expands the representation of Indigenous peoples beyond rural reservations into contemporary city landscapes.
A key theme across his work is the continuity of historical trauma into present-day lives. Orange embeds detailed historical contexts, such as Indian boarding schools, forced assimilation, and military imprisonment, directly into the lineage of his characters. This structure demonstrates how institutional history directly influences intergenerational family dynamics, personal identity struggles, and the search for belonging.
