From 1980s Cincinnati into the interstellar darkness, the stories of four women interconnect across the centuries in a gentle hymn to found families

This is the kind of book you pitch by analogy: JG Ballard meets Gabrielle Zevin; Isaac Asimov meets Stephen Chbosky; Ready Player One meets Love, Simon (replete with ferris wheel). I’ve been describing it to friends as a YA Kazuo Ishiguro set adrift in Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. It turns out I have two kinds of friends: those who hear that description as praise, and those who heed it as a warning.

Novels that demand comparisons rarely survive them. This one does (though it could do without that mawkish ferris wheel). American author Portia Elan’s debut is a gentle hymn to found families – the kin we choose rather than inherit – and it’s fitting that it reads that way, assembled from allegiances. Elan knows what her characters will discover: stories are how we claim one another.