Deep in the Dodauer Forest in northern Germany, there is a 500-year-old moss-covered oak tree surrounded by a low wooden fence. A ladder leaning against the tree leads to a knothole where, for over 100 years, would-be lovers have left messages for each other. The Bridegroom’s Oak, as the tree is called, gained such widespread acclaim that letters arrive there daily from around the world and the tree has its own zip code.
When Libba Bray, author of YA bestsellers including A Great and Terrible Beauty and The Diviners series, first heard the story of this romantic tree, her imagination took her in a completely different direction—to espionage. “I thought, what if, during WWII, this tree was also a dead drop for spies?” she said. “I always say that I write the story that won’t leave me alone, and this one wouldn’t leave me alone.” Her imaginative spin on a charming real-life tradition became the basis for her new stand-alone novel Under the Same Stars, out from FSG next February. Here we take a first look at the cover.
For Bray, the tree became “both connector and metaphor” for a multi-generational tale exploring “facets of love and resistance over time.” Under the Same Stars threads together three locations and time periods, starting in World War II Germany, with two girls who use the tree to send and receive messages, one about love and one about resistance. Those same themes emerge in the Cold War period, as two girls on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall encounter each other. Then, during the pandemic in 2020, two friends in New York City find themselves linked to events of the past in unexpected ways.
The novel was written during the pandemic when, Bray told PW, she was thinking a lot about “love not just in the romantic sense but in all of the senses: friends, family, but also community, because we were all in this together; we were all suffering and we needed one another yet had to find ways to be there for one another from a distance.”
Around the same time, the murder of George Floyd brought the urgency of fighting injustice to the forefront, and those issues intermingled for her. Because travel wasn’t an option at the time, she relied on research to create the town of Kleinwald where the World War II section of the book takes place, giving it “a bit of a fairy tale feel.”
She relied on her own experiences as a teen in the 1980s for the Cold War section of the book. “It was a challenge to realize that my adolescence is now historical,” she jokes. As for the pandemic timeline, she says she felt “an almost journalistic sense of capturing the mood and the details. Each day felt precious and fraught. I remember counting the seconds between ambulance sirens as if counting seconds between thunderclaps, gauging the strength of that day’s storm. And like Miles [one of the book’s contemporary characters], I was alone with only a dog for company for much of that time.”
Under the Same Stars is a bit of a departure for Bray, whose Diviners series heavily features fantasy elements. “There is nothing fantastical or supernatural here,” she said of her new novel. “Though one could argue that the Bridegroom’s Oak itself is somewhat magical and there is also a fairy tale component to the book. But by and large, it’s historical/contemporary realism with a central mystery.”
It’s also her first stand-alone novel in many years. Having three plot lines in one book rather than spread out over several books provided a “refreshing” change, Bray said, part of what she calls a “creative renaissance” in her work. She hopes the intertwined stories will offer a thought-provoking new perspective on familiar narratives.
“Under the Same Stars is a book about love and resistance—love as an act of resistance and resistance as an act of love,” she said. “I think we are familiar with the idea of resistance as an expression of anger, which certainly it can be. But acts of resistance can also spring from a deep love for what is good and right in this world, for that belief that we all live under the same stars and that a kinder, fairer, more just world is an idea worth fighting for.”
At the same time, she said, her characters demonstrate that fighting for what you believe in doesn’t necessarily require armed combat. “Readers might also take away that resistance and activism don’t always have to be grand gestures; they can be small, daily choices—but they are choices,” she said. Writing helped reaffirm to her that people have always pushed back against injustice and always will. “As a certain character in Under the Same Stars likes to say, “I remain hopeful,” she said.
