In a saturated market, it’s hard to make an astronomy book stand out. For me, the blurb and introduction of C Renée James’ Things That Go Bump in the Universe didn’t immediately differentiate it from the thousands of other similar popular-science titles.

This is a shame because James – a researcher at Sam Houston State University in the US – is an engaging writer who employs all the careful plotting and pacing of a detective novelist. Once it gets into its groove, the book covers the explosive lives and deaths of stars, which, as James reminds us, are but a short-lived blip in the story of a universe that is unstoppably cooling and expanding.

The book starts slowly, beginning with the first hints found by early astronomers that we inhabit only a tiny, dim corner of a vast and cacophonous cosmos. The smoking gun is the discovery that the universe extends far beyond our Milky Way, making the stars far brighter and more energetic than astronomers had thought possible. The rest of the book details a century of efforts to solve the mystery of how to align our understanding of physics with the wild growing pains of our stellar neighbours.

The characters we meet along the way – from binary stars to black holes – are painted with rich and lively prose

The characters we meet along the way – from binary stars to black holes – are painted with rich and lively prose, with James detailing the range of clues astronomers use to study these strange objects, including neutrinos, gamma-ray bursts and even tree rings. The chapters are short and punchy, and while they do build to a coherent story, they are self-contained enough that keeping up with James never feels like studying for an exam.

To the non-expert reader, the scale of the universe can sometimes be so cartoonishly large that it fails to make an impression. But James cleverly never takes her feet off the Earth. The faltering, human stories of the people who have tried to peer through the intergalactic noise – from the first Aboriginal Australians to modern astronomers – emphasize the awesome size of the events she describes.

Though the broadness of the book’s topic might have put me off picking it off the shelf, James manages to bring it all together in the final pages. I finished the book on my evening commute, and I found myself racing to reach the end before my train pulled into the station.

• 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press 304pp hb$29.95