Excerpt from The Blind Astronomer's Daughter by John Pipkin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Among the constellations that flash upon the bowl of his skull, Arthur glimpses shadows of his wife, Theodosia, long since lost to him, and he sees the unnamed twins gone before her, and his own mother and father, and his brothers too, all of them departed for the next world before there was time to chart the distance or hope for safe arrival, and this is nothing extraordinary, for he has seen them all before in the observatory, haunting the fringed glow of distant objects. And he can find no reason to doubt that in time even these shadows may be brought into focus and proven true. The heavens are too immense, too beautiful and varied, to fit into the mind of any one deity; the murmured creeds of fathers and sons are no match for the astronomer's gasp. But Arthur does not bother with speculations of what may come after death, for what need is there to dream of an eternity when there is proof to be had of the infinite?

The days come and go as he scribbles in his darkened bedroom and he cannot tell waking hours from sleep and it does not matter, for the visions come to him in both. He calls for more ink, sprinkles sand from the pounce pot over the damp pages in a gritty spray of stars, and he draws circles upon circles to demonstrate that nothing moves unless moved by something else. So it is for each glittering mote sweeping the black sky, jostled and herded by vagrant sparks. So, too, is green nature suffused with a yearning to bend everything that lives: massive trees slanted by sunlight and fields of tall grasses bowed by wind and aged bones warped along once sturdy lengths, all the things of creation always straining and reaching for one another. Arthur had felt the far corners of the heavens tugging at him when he stood in the door of the observatory, had felt the pull of the earth whenever he leaned past the roof edge, and even now, sunken in his bed, he takes comfort in gravity's firm hold. He imagines stepping from the roof, setting himself free to return to the soil and the stars, and what he sees here at the end makes him catch his breath. So simple a truth should have no need of discovery. Nothing in heaven or earth is content to be alone, and so there must always be something more. The universe is governed by a principle no more complicated than this: that a solitary body will forever attract another to itself.

* * *

After they find him sprawled and broken in the garden and there is nothing more to be done, Caroline Ainsworth collects the papers scattered around her father's bedroom and searches for some meaning in his last confused thoughts. In lucid moments he said that he was making an atlas, but the scraps of paper bear no resemblance to a map; they give no indication as to how they should be ordered or deciphered. Some pages are smudged with numbers and drawings, but most are blackened with ink from edge to edge. She carries them in the crook of her withered arm and places them in the hearth, but before the flames catch, she hears an admonition in the telescope's moan and she takes them back. She cannot bear to look at the scrawled nonsense but she cannot bring herself to burn the orphaned pages. Instead, she stitches them between blue marbled pasteboards, and the result looks more like a clutch of spindled receipts than a proper book. The inheritors of New Park will have no need for the devices and notebooks and maps, and before Caroline leaves for England she tucks the atlas among the other books to be forgotten. She tells herself that she is done with all of it, that she will not return. She will leave it to some idle stargazer to make sense of her father's inscrutable designs, for she will have nothing more to do with telescopes and lenses and polished mirrors; she will set her own course into the world, and she will not set foot in the observatory again.

From The Blind Astronomer's Daughter by John Pipkin, used with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing. © John Pipkin, 2016.