The Stars Are Not Yet Bells

Praise

Praise for The Stars Are Not Yet Bells:

“An exhilarating reading experience.” —NPR, Best Books of 2022

“This poignant novel is a testament to love and loss [and] the sacrifices made for love.” —The Washington Post

“A prophetic fever dream sprung from a singular imagination. Hannah Lillith Assadi is an incomparable stylist and a fearless storyteller. This novel is a lush, addicting, daring wonder.”
—Claire Vaye Watkins, author of I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness
 
“The beauty of Assadi’s prose and the splendid depiction of a love that transcends death make for a singular rendition of an oft-told story. This will leave readers undone.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“A lyrical, beautiful writer. . . the musicality of her language carries the emotion of it in such a way that’s unique to her.”  —Shelly Oria, Los Angeles Review of Books Podcast
 
“A poetically stunning and heartfelt story of love, loss and loneliness. . . . Assadi wonderfully keeps both Elle and the reader on the same pace toward discovery, remembrance and closure. . . . It was the beauty of Assadi’s writing that never failed to astonish me, encapsulated in elegant prose with lyrical, resonant language, chock-full of rich descriptions with haunting imagery and sensory detail.”  —Michigan Daily
 
“The poetic beauty of the writing and a certain swirling Gothic passion and drama bowl the reader along. . . . An unusual, intense, experimental novel.” —Daily Mail (UK)
 
“A heartbreaking and profoundly visionary book. Hannah Assadi movingly renders the kaleidoscopic nature of memory—revealing not only one woman’s disordered heart and mind, but the way our consciousness recombines shards of memory to create a glittering, prismatic view of a life. I wanted to stay in Assadi’s shimmering sentences for as long as I could.” —Emily Fridlund, author of History of Wolves
 
“A haunting elegy for loss, desire, and memory.” —Kirkus Reviews


“A luminous and deeply moving portrait of the end of life and the persistence of desire. While Hannah Lillith Assadi’s characters are forced to deny the truth of themselves and who they love, in her assured hands the extraordinary beauty of life and love and the natural world is never lost.”
—JoAnne Tompkins, author of What Comes After

“A rich, mesmerizing novel, in which waves of overlapping memory erode the landscape of a woman’s life until only feeling remains—both in the story and in the reader.” —Simon Van Booy, author of The Illusion of Separateness