From Black Fuego Press, the publisher behind the award-winning Silas Page, comes the debut novel from a new literary voice: Levar Desmond. The Stars They Wouldn't Name is Desmond's first novel, a work of historical fiction that reaches back into the silences of the American space program to tell a story the record almost lost. Jaxson Humphries was born in Birmingham in 1939 and raised in Dayton, Ohio, by a white family who chose him completely and could not tell him where he came from.
He grew up building model airplanes on a windowsill and watching jets climb into the gray, certain of one thing before he had words for it: he was going to fly. He became the best pilot almost no one would let him be. First in his engineering class. Forty-four combat missions in Korea. The highest scores in the astronaut program. And every step of the way, a quiet machinery of small men worked to keep him out of the seat he had earned, building a file against him out of a single blank space in his record: the name of his father.
When Jaxson finally learns who that father was, the discovery changes the weight of everything he carries toward the launchpad. By 1967 his name is on a crew manifest the whole country can read, eight days from the mission he has been reaching toward his entire life. A novel about inheritance, excellence, and the people who keep the record when no one is watching, The Stars They Wouldn't Name asks what we owe the ones who were good enough and were never named, and the country that almost let him prove it.
From Black Fuego Press, the publisher behind the award-winning Silas Page, comes the debut novel from a new literary voice: Levar Desmond. The Stars They Wouldn't Name is Desmond's first novel, a work of historical fiction that reaches back into the silences of the American space program to tell a story the record almost lost. Jaxson Humphries was born in Birmingham in 1939 and raised in Dayton, Ohio, by a white family who chose him completely and could not tell him where he came from.
He grew up building model airplanes on a windowsill and watching jets climb into the gray, certain of one thing before he had words for it: he was going to fly. He became the best pilot almost no one would let him be. First in his engineering class. Forty-four combat missions in Korea. The highest scores in the astronaut program. And every step of the way, a quiet machinery of small men worked to keep him out of the seat he had earned, building a file against him out of a single blank space in his record: the name of his father.
When Jaxson finally learns who that father was, the discovery changes the weight of everything he carries toward the launchpad. By 1967 his name is on a crew manifest the whole country can read, eight days from the mission he has been reaching toward his entire life. A novel about inheritance, excellence, and the people who keep the record when no one is watching, The Stars They Wouldn't Name asks what we owe the ones who were good enough and were never named, and the country that almost let him prove it.
