The Dog Stars

I first heard about The Dog Stars by Peter Heller in an interview with Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven. It was one of the books that inspired her. I thoroughly enjoyed Station Eleven so I thought I would give The Dog Stars a chance and I am so glad that I did. 

It is a heart breaking book with sweet tender moments about loss, love, and the ties we form with people. One of my favorite little bits of the book Hig, the narrator describes making up constellations. There is something romantic about that to me and it seems like it could be fun.

Hig survived the flu that killed everyone he knows. His wife is gone, his friends are dead, he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, his only neighbor a gun-toting misanthrope. In his 1956 Cessna, Hig flies the perimeter of the airfield or sneaks off to the mountains to fish and to pretend that things are the way they used to be. But when a random transmission somehow beams through his radio, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life—something like his old life—exists beyond the airport. Risking everything, he flies past his point of no return—not enough fuel to get him home—following the trail of the static-broken voice on the radio. But what he encounters and what he must face—in the people he meets, and in himself—is both better and worse than anything he could have hoped for.

Narrated by a man who is part warrior and part dreamer, a hunter with a great shot and a heart that refuses to harden, The Dog Stars is both savagely funny and achingly sad, a breathtaking story about what it means to be human. -Amazon Description