An Astonishment of Stars: Stories

A beautifully written short story collection that charts the lives of racialized women as they navigate their relationships, aspirations, and the burdens of memory and expectations

＂Sharply observed and gracefully told, this is a collection shining with all the unexpected delights and defeats that make up a life.＂ -- Anuja Varghese, author of Chrysalis

The wife who uses the name of her white husband in public. The mother who cleans the small-town hospital while her daughter moves to the city to forget their shared past. The well-behaved teen girl who anxiously watches her older sister slip further and further away from their hovering parents. Each of these characters is both familiar and singular, reminding us of women we have been, of our mothers and daughters, neighbors and adversaries.

Kirti Bhadresa is a keen observer of humanity, especially of the BIPOC women whose domestic and professional work is the backbone of late-stage capitalism but whose lives receive so little attention in mainstream culture. An Astonishment of Stars is a collection that sees those who are unseen and cuts to the heart of contemporary womanhood, community collisions, and relationships both chosen and forced upon us.

Kirti Bhadresa’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, The Quarantine Review, The Sprawl, and Room, and she has been a finalist for the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association Award in the category of Feature Writing. Bhadresa lives with her family in Calgary, AB, on Treaty 7 territory.