ABOVE US ONLY SKY By Michele Young-Stone Book Spotlight

“Young-Stone has written a novel that’s both fanciful and brutally realistic. . . . From America to Lithuania, from past to present, this is a heart-wrenching tale for literary fiction fans and particularly for readers interested in World War II.”

—Library Journal

 “Above Us Only Sky is a raw, beautiful, unforgettable book that folds unfathomable horrors and unfathomable love into a story of incredible power. At the center, literal and figurative, of this novel is a story so brilliantly simple and deeply moving, you’ll forget you are reading a book. This story shook me to my core, and I can’t wait for the rest of the world to experience it.”

—Lydia Netzer, bestselling author of Shine Shine Shine and How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

“Rich with themes of love and loss. Young-Stone has spun a beautiful tale on the cusp of magical realism, but with 100% pure magical prose.

 —Heidi Durrow, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

“The beautiful prose in Michele Young-Stone’s Above Us Only Sky flies off the page. A stirring meditation on resilience, the ties that bind us to our past, and what it means to have wings.”

—Tracy Guzeman, author of The Gravity of Birds

 The Book 

A luminous, richly imagined novel, ABOVE US ONLY SKY (Simon & Schuster hardcover; March 3rd, 2015) by Michele Young-Stone blends the fabulous with the brutally real as Prudence Eleanor Vilkas sets out to discover the epic story of her ancestors—the incredible Vilkas women—and the shared history of their war-torn Lithuania. On March 29, 1973, Prudence was born with a pair of wings molded to her back. Considered a birth defect, her wings were surgically removed, leaving only the ghost of them behind. But when Prudence meets her long-estranged Lithuanian grandfather at age fifteen, the Old Man introduces her to a miraculous lineage beating and pulsing with past Lithuanian bird-women, storytellers with wings dragging the dirt, survivors perched on radio towers, lovers lit up like fireworks, and heroes disguised as everyday men and women.

Guided by the Old Man’s stories and haunted by a watchful winged apparition, Prudence finds that her own history is deeply intertwined with the complex history of her nation and the people who survived generations of conflict at the mercy of Josef Stalin and Soviet oppression. 

 ABOVE US ONLY SKY moves from the 1864 January Uprising of the Lithuanian freedom fighters against Russian Tsarist rule to the seaside hamlet of Palanga, where survivors of Stalin’s rule sought freedom under a brief Nazi regime in the early 1940’s; to the “The Singing Revolution” that saw Lithuania regain independence in 1991. It’s a story of migration—from Lithuania, from WWII Germany and even from Nashville, Tennessee, where Prudence and her mother leave her father for the seaside town of Los Vientos, Florida. It’s in Los Vientos that Prudence meets Wheaton Jones, a boy with golden curls and wild visions, and the only other person who can see her wings. Michele Young-Stone deftly moves between these stories—and across wars, oceans and generations—to weave together an unforgettable narrative of impossible love, unfathomable loss, and the importance of finding a sense of belonging through mutual understanding.

 In telling the story of the long history of conflict across Europe in a wholly original way, ABOVE US ONLY SKY gives voice to a population largely ignored in history books. Ultimately what emerges from the pages of this brilliant novel is an astounding sense of resilience, hope, and reverence for the past—no matter how traumatic or tragic—that connects us to our families, to shared history and survival against great odds.   

The Author:

Michele Young-Stone is the author of the novels Above Us Only Sky and The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors, which The Boston Globe called “an exceptionally rich and sure-handed debut.” She lives in the Outer Banks of North Carolina with her husband and son.