Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Bookseller Created
PRIDE Is A Year Round Thing
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale!
Shop the sale
Bookseller pick
Send as gift
Add to Wish List
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop the sale
In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowThe Prettiest Star
Length
10 hours 21 minutes
Language
English
Narrators
Charlie Thurston & Tiffany Morgan
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreBookseller recommendation
“This beautiful, elegiac novel tells the story of the last homecoming to rural Ohio for Brian, who is dying of AIDS at the height of the 1980s epidemic. Told with empathy and heart, complemented by a pitch-perfect sense of time and place, The Prettiest Star is a deeply affecting story about what it means to understand each other and where we come from, even when our lives have taken us light years away.”
— Ashley Warlick • M. Judson Booksellers & Storytellers
Small-town Appalachia doesn't have a lot going for it, but it's where Brian is from, where his family is, and where he's chosen to return to die.
At eighteen, Brian, like so many other promising young gay men, arrived in New York City without much more than a love for the freedom and release from his past that it promised. But within six short years, AIDS would claim his lover, his friends, and his future. With nothing left in New York but memories of death, Brian decides to write his mother a letter asking to come back to the place, and family, he was once so desperate to escape.
Set in 1986, a year after Rock Hudson's death shifted the public consciousness of the epidemic and brought the news of AIDS into living rooms and kitchens across America, The Prettiest Star is part Dog Years by Mark Doty and part Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt. But it is also an urgent story now: it a novel about the politics and fragility of the body; it is a novel about sex and shame. And it is a novel that speaks to the question of what home and family means when we try to forge a life for ourselves in a world that can be harsh and unpredictable.
Contains mature themes.
Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Evening Hour. He is the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, and has been awarded scholarships to Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, VCCA, and the MacDowell Colony. His essays and fiction have appeared in various publications, including Guernica, Bellevue Literary Review, and BuzzFeed, and he is the editor of Untangling the Knot: Queer Voices on Marriage, Relationships & Identity. Carter is assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers Studio low-residency MFA program.
Charlie Thurston has appeared on stages across the country, including Trinity Repertory Company, Arden Theatre Company, Baltimore Center Stage, Intiman Theater, Chautauqua Theater Company, and Riverside Theatre. Charlie holds an MFA in acting from Brown University/Trinity Rep.
Narrating stories from a place of curiosity, compassion, and delight, Tiffany Morgan accesses her twenty-plus years as an actor to lift the story from the page and into the listener's imagination. Having narrated over 200 titles in a variety of genres, Tiffany's sweet spot is balanced somewhere between cozy mysteries, stories set in the southern United States, and nonfiction books with an empowered female point of view. She also has enjoyed narrating dozens of children's books and educational titles for school curriculums and training. In addition to audiobooks, Tiffany works regularly in film and television, regional theater productions, improv, and a diverse group of animated series.
