The weight of small gravities

Forty light-years from home, the dead can still speak.

Twenty-five years ago, astrophysicist Halina Brooke found the faint signal that told the world a great blue star was dying. That same night, on the far side of the planet, her nine-year-old daughter Etta died of meningitis while Halina’s phone sat locked in a cupboard at the observatory.

Now Halina has taken a one-way berth on Compline Station, orbiting the star she discovered, to watch it die. She has brought nothing with her except a small grey pebble her daughter once gave her. She has no intention of ever going home.

Then, buried in twenty years of rejected data, she finds a name she hasn’t seen typed since the funeral.

Etta is alive. She is thirty-four, an instrument scientist on a station exactly like this one, in a version of events where the cloud never cleared on that long-ago night, Halina flew home in time, and it was Halina who died instead.

As the star’s heart begins to fail, the two realities are pressing together into one, and only one of them will survive. On Etta’s station, crewmates start to vanish without anyone noticing they were ever there. Halina has a few short months, a failing link and a lifetime of things left unsaid. And she has to learn the one thing she has never been able to do: to stay in the room while someone she loves is leaving.

The Weight of Small Gravities is a heartbreaking, deeply human science fiction novel about grief, second chances and the invisible forces that hold us to the people we love. For readers of Emily St. John Mandel, Kazuo Ishiguro and Becky Chambers, it is emotional, character-driven speculative fiction that will stay with you long after the last page.

Everything pulls on everything else. Even the smallest things. Even across worlds.

📖 278 pages