The Distance Between Stars – Paperback

The announcement comes on a Friday: a craft has come down in the Arizona desert, and it did not come from Earth.

Within hours, the world is celebrating. Governments promise a crewed mission to answer it. Fortunes and careers are rebuilt overnight. Only a few people notice that the raw data has been sealed.

Adrian Wells, a theoretical physicist who has spent his life calculating what it would cost to reach another star, knows the numbers don’t work. Saying so makes him the country’s most hated scientist. At home, his marriage is coming apart under the weight of an old grief. On Ceres, his daughter Freya waits through a habitat emergency while every message she sends home sits in a government review queue.

His wife, Miriam, a former reporter, has started following a trail of altered invoices and missing files. Valeria, a brilliant physicist, watches her own experiment become the evidence everyone wants. At the range, inspector Leila Sayegh finds what the official story leaves out.

As the pressure rises, each of them has to decide what the truth is worth, and who will pay for it. The answer reaches a hearing room and beyond, and not everyone survives it unchanged.

Meanwhile, in an old archive, a faint signal from fourteen hundred light-years away goes on, waiting for someone to take it seriously.

The Distance Between Stars is a novel of science and conspiracy, of a family stretched across the solar system, and of the gap between what we want to believe and what we can prove. Some distances can be crossed. Others can only be measured.