Carry the Sky

“In the rich rarified world of a prep school, Kate Gray has woven two powerful personal stories into a charged and compelling human novel which shows us that swimming under that quirky, antic, off-beat community are also life and death. Gray has a sharp eye and tells her story with verve and a deft touch.”

– Ron Carlson, author of The Signal and A Kind of Flying

“Lyrical, moving, and hauntingly beautiful, Kate Gray’s Carry the Sky winds between two voices, Taylor and Song, both navigating the narrow lanes of St. Timothy’s boarding school where they teach, both hitting the walls that surround them. One uses science to make sense of loneliness, loss, and desire—the other uses the beat of a rower’s oar in water. Together these two outsiders struggle to move past mourning, to seek hope as they crack open their insular world. Carry the Sky is full of unforgettable characters and images, each word carefully chosen, like a perfect fold in a paper crane, creating a graceful neck, strong tail, and mighty wings, perched on the edge of the page, ready to take flight.”

– Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief and co-founder of One Story

“A splendid debut novel, beautifully written and brimming over with humanity and grace, alternately humorous and heart-wrenching.”

– Christopher Buckley, author of But Enough About You

“Set in a boarding school in 1983, Carry the Sky is a haunting exploration of loneliness, grief, and desire. In lyrical, elegant prose, Kate Gray spins a tale of characters struggling to forgive themselves and to find each other, and reminds us to pay attention to the ordinary and unexpected flashes of beauty around us: a brilliant kite, geese overhead, a paper crane in a tree.”

– Carter Sickels, author of The Evening Hour

“Carry the Sky is as intricate and precise as the paper cranes its characters fold. It comes as no surprise that Kate Gray is a poet as well as a fine novelist. Here we are surely in a poet’s hands, her lyricism and attention to detail elevating the boarding-school narrative to something heartbreaking and truly universal.”

– Cari Luna, author of The Revolution of Every Day

“In the small, close world of a boarding school, three broken people circle each other, drawing closer to the tragedy that will move them all, finally, beyond their private sorrows. Three voices, three stories, and we are caught up in those stories as they are slowly revealed, like shards of a shattered mirror, one piece at a time. There is huge humanity in this novel. It is shockingly beautiful. Kate Gray is relentless.”

– Joanna Rose, author of Little Miss Strange

“Carry the Sky is a dazzling narrative mosaic about innocence lost, the ghosts we grieve, and the emptiness of some forms of discipline and delineation. Kate Gray gives us a ‘page-turner’ in the best sense: you’ll want to read both fast and slow, moving back and forth through this fearlessly told story, savoring.”

– M. Allen Cunningham, author of The Green Age of Asher Witherow and Lost Son

“The people in Kate Gray’s intricate, visceral, and heartbreaking novel Carry the Sky armor themselves. Cocooned in sport, science, sex, power, privilege, or eccentricity, they face the fragility of their invented safe spaces when love, sex, violation, and obsession strip them to their most intimate selves. I can’t say enough good things about this sizzling, deeply profound, poetic work.”

– Davis Slater, author of Selling Sin at the Hoot-Possum Auction

“In Carry the Sky, two lonely hearts beat: Taylor Alta’s in time to a coxn’s chant, and Jack Song’s to the mathematical pulse of physics equations. Both are misfits in the moneyed, J. Crew world of St. Timothy’s, an exclusive New England boarding school where the privileges of the old boy network threaten to trump right and wrong. This smartly told story kept me turning pages late into the night, and reaching for the book as soon as I woke up. Kate Gray’s prose sings as she gives us schoolyard bullying, unrequited love, unresolved grief, adolescent desire running amok, and adult desire scarcely contained.”

– Stevan Allred, author of A Simplified Map of the Real World