The Fault in Our Stars

The Fault in Our Stars
by John Green


The Fault in Our Stars is the sixth novel by author John Green, published in January 2012. The story is narrated by a sixteen-year-old cancer patient named Hazel, who is forced by her parents to attend a support group, where she subsequently meets and falls in love with the seventeen-year-old Augustus Waters, an ex-basketball player and amputee.

 The title is inspired from Act 1, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, in which the nobleman Cassius says to Brutus: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

 The story takes place in Indianapolis, Indiana, where sixteen-year-old Hazel Grace Lancaster reluctantly attends a cancer patients' support group at her mother's behest. Because of her cancer, she uses a portable oxygen tank to breathe adequately. In one of the meetings she catches the eye of a teenage boy, and through the course of the meeting she learns the boy's name is Augustus Waters.