Brimful of Starlight

For all her seeming good fortune, Lily can’t help feeling that, somewhere, her young life might have taken a wrong turn. Something’s missing. Xu Zhimo, is missing something, too. Not least, a clue as to why he’s wandering the College gardens thinking that it’s still 1921. It seems the (future) great poet is trapped. Only the magic of his most famous, as-yet unwritten, poem can bring back the love he lost on the banks of the Cam and return his restless spirit to its own time. That and the more worldly interventions of a fellow-student trying to balance the baffling intellectual demands of her Functional Genomics course with the more basic aspects of survival, namely, eating (way too little), drinking (way too much) and sleeping (all too rarely) while figuring out what to do about Matt, the annoying – yet strangely intriguing – history student who specialises in being impossible to avoid.

Lily’s determined to forge her own path and not the one her pushy parents have laid out for her. First, though, she’ll have to learn there’s more to life than passing exams, especially when confronted by fair-weather friendships, a life-threatening shortage of biscuits, a distant promise of love, an omniscient Chinese granny, a pitfully pathetic potted-plant and a charming ghost who doesn’t even know he’s dead.