The Giver of Stars was published by Michael Joseph (Penguin) in 2019. Based on the historical Pack Horse Library Project of the 1930s and 1940s — a WPA initiative that employed women to deliver books on horseback and mule to remote communities in the Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky — the novel follows five women whose work carrying books through dangerous terrain becomes an act of resistance against poverty, ignorance, and patriarchal control.
Alice Van Cleve is an Englishwoman who married a Kentuckian and moved to the small mining town of Baileyville, where she discovers that her husband is weak, her father-in-law is tyrannical, and her life as a wife consists of decorative imprisonment. The packhorse library offers escape: physical (riding mountain trails), intellectual (access to books and ideas), and social (companionship with women of different classes and backgrounds who share the work).
The group includes Margery O’Hare (tough, independent, the daughter of a notorious moonshiner), Beth Pinker (quiet, observant, hiding a terrible home life), Izzy Brady (privileged, naive, finding purpose for the first time), and Sophia (a Black woman in a segregated community, whose presence challenges the town’s racial codes). Their friendship is forged through shared danger — flooded creeks, hostile dogs, suspicious husbands, and a community that views books (and the women who deliver them) as threats to the established order.
Collecting The Giver of Stars
First edition (Michael Joseph / Penguin, London, 2019): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $8–$15
- Signed first edition: $20–$40
- US first (Viking/Pamela Dorman, 2019): $8–$15