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'sIn 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.