BookBrowse Reviews Nightfaring by Megan Eaves-Egenes

BookBrowse:

A thoughtful, searching piece of nonfiction that explores the beauty and importance of our increasingly endangered night sky.

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If you go out at night and look up at the sky, what do you see? It depends on where you are, but if you're like most people, you may not see very much. In the cities and the suburbs, the glow of streetlights, buildings, and other sources of illumination rise upwards, rendering the stars ancient sailors used to navigate all but invisible in their glare. There are places, especially in rural areas, where you can see the full splendor of the Milky Way in the night sky, but these are rarer than they used to be, and they grow more rare by the day.

Megan Eaves-Egenes, a travel writer known for her work on Lonely Planet, has dedicated herself to the preservation of the night sky. In Nightfaring, she journeys from location to location—a small English village with no streetlights, a hill in Uzbekistan where a medieval astronomer plied his trade, a health resort in Japan with a focus on the benefits of darkness—to take in the majesty of the night while also highlighting how thoroughly modern society has pushed it to the margins. Along the way, she weaves in autobiographical details about her childhood in rural New Mexico, her struggles during the Covid-19 lockdown, and a love affair with a fellow dark sky enthusiast in Argentina.

Nightfaring is at its best highlighting corners of the globe you may not have known about, pockets of resistance to encroaching modernity. Take, for instance, Dennis Severs' House, a museum/art piece in London that transports visitors back in time to a pre-electricity home—the space is designed "to evoke the feeling as you enter each room that a member of the family had left moments before." This is effectively contrasted with the rest of London, which Eaves-Egenes positions as a sort of ground zero for bright, unnatural modernity: it was one of the first cities to be illuminated at night, first by torches and then by gas and electric lights, which today are a "relentless, inexhaustible flood."

Or consider a visit to Ireland, where Eaves-Egenes' longing for the night sky dovetails with remembrances of other things that were once present in this location but are no longer, such as the Southern Cross (a constellation now exclusively visible in the Southern Hemisphere); an ancient friary once used as a home base for a figure from Irish folklore, the pirate Grace O'Malley, aka Granuaile; and tales of the banshee, a wailing woman spirit from Irish mythology associated with darkness.

Eaves-Egenes wisely keeps most of her focus on the night sky and the ways of life surrounding it. The autobiographical elements, as important as they undoubtedly are to the author, aren't quite as interesting. Her prose, while functional, doesn't do enough to make these segments feel like more than asides. But the meat of the book is so interesting that it's easy to forgive. If you live in a place with lots of light pollution (as I do), this will make you want to travel somewhere quiet and look up.

This review first ran in the May 20, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.