What’s so frustrating about Hold Back The Stars is that the ideas driving it are interesting, absorbing – original even – and yet, the prose doesn’t remotely do them justice.
The dialogue feels false, the plotting of the story is scattergun, and the central relationship between our protagonists, Carys and Max, is wholly unconvincing.
Set in a future where nuclear weapons have destroyed both America and the Middle East, individuals of the surviving ‘Europia’ are encouraged to be just that, individual – singular, solitary.
Love, children and settling down? All that can wait. But of course, Carys, a shuttle pilot, and Max, a chef, go ahead and fall in love anyway, and when we meet them, all that emotion’s landed them in space, stranded outside their ship with only 90 minutes of air left.
It’s the world they’ve left behind that’s fascinating though, governed democratically, but with strict rules that leave people lonely, if bilingual and having travelled the globe, not the insipid love story the book hinges on.
There’s lots of potential here, but Khan isn’t decisive enough, leaving the reader with an unsatisfying collection of diluted strands and unanswered questions, which really is a shame.
