Acclaimed author Cherie Dimaline's Hunting by Stars was first published in late 2021. Hunting by Stars is set in a world in chaos. Because of natural disasters and different diseases, much of the human population has been decimated. And as a result of this decimation, the few that remain have stopped dreaming. Dreams, the novel says, are the building block of civilization; without them, people become ill and sick and unproductive. One group, however, has retained their ability to dream: the Indigenous people of North America. To try and give dreams to the rest of the world, schools are created to harvest the dreams (which are thought to be created as a result of activity in the bone marrow of the Indigenous people) of the Indigenous people. The world descends into chaos from the revelation that the Indigenous people are able to dream.
When it was published in 2021, Hunting by Stars was hotly anticipated as the sequel to the wildly successful The Marrow Thieves, which was first published in 2017. Hunting by Stars lived up to the hype. In their review of the novel, for instance, one writer called the book "A spellbinding sequel" and said that "Dimaline paints a nightmarish world that is too easy to imagine; it will haunt readers long after they turn the final page." Other reviewers praised Dimaline's writing and singled out Hunting by Stars for being so "engrossing."
