The Stars Are Not Yet Bells

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER AND NPR

Through the scrim of fading memory, an elderly woman confronts a lifetime of secrets and betrayal, under the mysterious skies of her island home

Off the coast of Georgia, near Savannah, generations have been tempted by strange blue lights in the sky near an island called Lyra. At the height of WWII, impressionable young Elle Ranier leaves New York City to forge a new life together on the island with her new husband, Simon. There they will live for decades, raising a family while waging a quixotic campaign to find the source of the mysterious blue offshore light–and the elusive minerals rumored to lurk beneath the surface.

Fifty years later, Elle looks back at her life on the mysterious island–and at a secret she herself has guarded for decades. As her memory recedes into the mists of Alzheimer’s disease, her life seems a tangle of questions: How did her husband’s business, now shuttered, survive so long without ever finding the legendary Lyra stones? How did her own life crumble under treatment for depression? And what became of Gabriel–the handsome, raffish other man who came to the island with them and risked everything to follow the lights?

Darkly romantic and deeply haunting, The Stars Are Not Yet Bells pulls us into a story of the tantalizing, faithless relationship between ourselves and the lives and souls we leave behind.

Editorial Reviews

*10/18/2021

Assadi (Sonora) returns with a lyrical and melancholic tale of grief, love, and a marriage’s open secrets, narrated by a woman who has Alzheimer’s. In 1941, Elle Ranier and her jeweler husband, Simon, moved from New York City as young newlyweds to a remote island off the coast of Georgia in search of a variety of jewel akin to diamonds and known locally as the „blue legend.“ Many people have drowned while seeking the minerals, which are believed to lie at the bottom of the ocean, and Simon’s fruitless search eventually leaves his business in shambles. Now, in 1997, Elle remembers her previous lover, Gabriel, in Brooklyn, whom she arranged to work with Simon on the island after claiming he was her cousin, and who died shortly after they arrived. Then, in 1961, Simon grows close with a geologist hired to prospect for the jewels. Elle’s reminiscences become hazy as a result of her Alzheimer’s, though „for a while, life remained in bright dreams,“ which evokes a sense of magic with images of mermaids and fairies. As the story of the trio’s arrival to the island and their subsequent misfortunes gradually unfolds, Elle circles around the secrets about her and Simon’s relationships with other men. The beauty of Assadi’s prose and the splendid depiction of a love that transcends death make for a singular rendition of an oft-told story. This will leave readers undone. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Jan.)
– Publishers Weekly

08/01/2021

During World War II, blue lights deck the skies above an island called Lyra off Georgia’s coast, and Elle Ranier’s new husband, Simon, is sent to Lyra by his industrialist father to discover their source. They could be generated by valuable minerals found offshore, and the business Simon establishes to find them employs many of the island’s inhabitants for 50 years but never succeeds in its goal. Here, Elle reflect on her long life on the island and a secret she has kept close. From National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree Assadi, whose debut novel, Sonora, was a PEN/Robert W. Bingham finalist.
– Library Journal

2021-10-13
An elderly woman facing dementia examines her memories to uncover the truth about her past.

„Time does not move forward, but falls backward,“ thinks narrator Elle Ranier as she sifts through fading memories in Assadi’s dreamy, elegiac novel about loss and desire, set on Lyra, an island off the coast of Georgia. „The island has never wanted us,“ Elle says, but it is people who spark the real friction there, not Lyra’s wild and inhospitable coast. Elle is elderly now, and the line between past and present is slipping out of her grasp as she slides into dementia. But she is determined to remember the hidden corners of her life and piece together answers to mysteries that confuse and trouble her. An impoverished girl who married into a wealthy family, Elle came to Lyra as a new bride at the start of World War II, with her husband, Simon, and her cousin Gabriel (who is not her cousin at all). Simon, a man with secrets of his own, is obsessed by the mysterious blue lights offshore and legends of miraculous minerals under the sea. Elle is obsessed with Gabriel. Potent streaks of longing and melancholy run through the novel: All of its characters want what they can’t have, and Assadi returns again and again to the lasting pain of broken hopes and dreams. The story moves abruptly back and forth in time, but though Elle’s mind leaps erratically, following the story is never difficult. When they come, the revelations are not entirely surprising, but Assadi still creates a haunting mood of despair and regret.

A haunting elegy for loss, desire, and memory.
– Kirkus Reviews

Praise for The Stars Are Not Yet Bells:

„An exhilarating reading experience.“ –NPR, Best Books of 2022

„This poignant novel is a testament to love and loss [and] the sacrifices made for love.“ –The Washington Post

„A prophetic fever dream sprung from a singular imagination. Hannah Lillith Assadi is an incomparable stylist and a fearless storyteller. This novel is a lush, addicting, daring wonder.“
–Claire Vaye Watkins, author of I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness

„The beauty of Assadi’s prose and the splendid depiction of a love that transcends death make for a singular rendition of an oft-told story. This will leave readers undone.“ –Publishers Weekly (starred review)

„A lyrical, beautiful writer. . . the musicality of her language carries the emotion of it in such a way that’s unique to her.“ –Shelly Oria, Los Angeles Review of Books Podcast

„A poetically stunning and heartfelt story of love, loss and loneliness. . . . Assadi wonderfully keeps both Elle and the reader on the same pace toward discovery, remembrance and closure. . . . It was the beauty of Assadi’s writing that never failed to astonish me, encapsulated in elegant prose with lyrical, resonant language, chock-full of rich descriptions with haunting imagery and sensory detail.“ –Michigan Daily

„The poetic beauty of the writing and a certain swirling Gothic passion and drama bowl the reader along. . . . An unusual, intense, experimental novel.“ –Daily Mail (UK)

„A heartbreaking and profoundly visionary book. Hannah Assadi movingly renders the kaleidoscopic nature of memory–revealing not only one woman’s disordered heart and mind, but the way our consciousness recombines shards of memory to create a glittering, prismatic view of a life. I wanted to stay in Assadi’s shimmering sentences for as long as I could.“ –Emily Fridlund, author of History of Wolves

„A haunting elegy for loss, desire, and memory.“ –Kirkus Reviews

„A luminous and deeply moving portrait of the end of life and the persistence of desire. While Hannah Lillith Assadi’s characters are forced to deny the truth of themselves and who they love, in her assured hands the extraordinary beauty of life and love and the natural world is never lost.“
–JoAnne Tompkins, author of What Comes After

„A rich, mesmerizing novel, in which waves of overlapping memory erode the landscape of a woman’s life until only feeling remains–both in the story and in the reader.“ –Simon Van Booy, author of The Illusion of Separateness
– From the Publisher