‘Joy and heartbreak skillfully interwoven’ could sum up this beautiful book from John Green. I’m a huge fan of Green’s writing: “Looking for Alaska”, “Paper Towns” and now “The Fault in our stars”, the latter being my favourite.

Superficially, this is a story of two teenagers (Hazel and Augustus or Gus), both cancer sufferers, who fall in love. But to tell that story is to sell the novel short, because it tells us so much more about our lives, why we live and how we should live.

Dedicated to Esther Earl, a teenage cancer sufferer who Green met as a chaplain in a children’s hospital, Green says: “She was an otherwise normal girl who was funny and smart and I wanted to capture those qualities in Hazel Lancaster.”

I GET these kids, painted so poignantly by Green, ordinary teenagers stuck in their pain of dying, and their even more excruciating pain of living! “You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you,” Gus pens (p.313).

This novel almost feels to me like a still life – as though Hazel and Augustus are teenagers caught glaring into the spotlight as we examine their lives, their humane and vulnerable beauty exposed, questioning the platitudes thrown at them by adults, catching the nuances of meaning in each moment, the blackest humour in everyday existence, all beautifully rendered in Green’s prose like a piece of art.

It’s love that triumphs in the end – ‘better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’. Even though we know from the beginning that due to ‘the fault in their stars’, their love will not last, that the painful reality is that ‘some infinities are bigger than other infinities’, we are caught up in their fight to make meaning of their lives and to survive. Esther herself reminds us: “…don’t forget to be awesome — love, Esther.” And they are truly awesome, as is Green’s writing! Highly recommended.

Mrs Osborne