Those who like novels where everything ties up nicely and where every event has some significance in the final analysis will find much to enjoy here. Having enjoyed the light, chatty feel of the story I was surprised, not to say impressed, when I reached the end and realised how many important little details had been sneaked into the plot.

Beginning in Florida with the events of the space shuttle disaster of 1986, an event most people my age and above will remember well, there is a celestial theme running doggedly through the novel, even finding its way into the title, but it is rather more a story about relationships and the people and culture of Miami. Particularly impressive were the sections taking place in that city as the narrator Claire befriends wannabe star Tess (“I’m managed by a friend of Lenny Kravitz’s hairdresser”) – they felt as though they had been a lot of fun to write and consequently were a lot of fun to read. There was a serious side to the novel too, and in particular I thought the paragraph where Claire describes her late father was an outstanding piece of writing.

The were one or two negatives for me but they were very minor. First person present tense usually starts grating on me after a couple of hundred pages, like an overdose of something syrupy, and it was the same here. And I found it curious how Claire arrives in Florida after years and years away from the USA and starts talking about people “fixing coffee”. Nobody fixes anything in the UK unless it’s broken, or it’s a snooker match. Maybe it was meant to be a case of “when in Rome...” but it felt odd. Those things aside, I liked this very much and hope to read more by this author. ( )

Original, quirky novel about a sister going to Miami in search of her missing brother, and redefining herself and place in the family to boot. ( )

Claire and her brother Daniel are quite close in age.They lived in Florida as children, as their dad worked on a hotel rennovation, and Daniel - now grown up and quite well off with a young family has gone missing.

Claire and ex-husband Michael travel in what they hope are his footsteps to find him, a lost soul, who has suffered an awful event in his childhood that has shaped his life. ( )

OK confession time: as a college student about ten years ago I had a poster of Ms. Wener on my wall. It’s with mixed feelings then that I come to review her new novel, where her transition from Britpop pinup to serious author seems almost complete. THE HALF LIFE OF STARS is primarily the story of a dysfunctional family and the effects that resonate from a holiday to Florida at the time when the space shuttle exploded in the sky. There’s an effective whodunnit/mystery element to the storyline and Wener steers neatly away from clichés and pop culture references, but ultimately the effect is like reading a middle-period Douglas Coupland novel. I found myself wishing it about a third better, sadly. ( )