The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Johnson, Denis. The Stars at Noon. Harper Collins. First HarperPerennial Edition. 1995.

The story is told from the first-person perspective of an unnamed female narrator, who uses language with a range of qualities (hard-boiled and sharp edged to poetic and vulnerable) and a range of tenses (moving back and forth between past and present) that keep the reader guessing in ways that stylistically evoke the uncertainties and unpredictability of the book’s plot.

The book begins with something of a prologue – that is, a sexual encounter between the narrator and a Nicaraguan soldier who also wants her to turn over her identification papers. She refuses. As she returns to her hotel, she encounters an Englishman who eventually reveals that he is on the run from various authorities who want to talk with him – for various reasons – about his sharing of oil industry secrets between rival companies. She agrees to help him find his way out of the country – Nicaragua – and also starts to fall in love with him. As they wait for a part to be delivered for the car that they have purchased, they have an intense series of sexual encounters that leave the narrator questioning her personal morality.

Eventually the car part arrives, and the narrator and the Englishman prepare to leave, the narrator continues to act on her determination to be helpful even though her instinctive response is to leave the Englishman and save herself. The first attempt of the two travelers results in failure, because the long lines of people trying to get out of Nicaragua delay their arrival at the border crossing, which is closed when they finally do get there. The next day, the narrator and the Englishman arrive at the border, only to find that they are to be arrested – the Englishman because of his illicit information-sharing activities, the narrator because she is carrying illegally large sums of Nicaraguan currency.

When the authorities interview the narrator, they are joined by an American corporate investigations officer whom the narrator had encountered earlier on her journey with the Englishman. The American tells her that unless she turns the Englishman over to him and says that she was not at all involved in his information-passing, she will be arrested too. The narrator realizes that she essentially has no choice but to do as she is asked. The Englishman is arrested, and the narrator goes free.

A short time later, the narrator is at a new hotel in a new and different country. She has frequent, and troubling, hallucinations of the Englishman, whom she assumes has been killed. In the meantime, she tries to get her life back on track, but ends up returning to prostitution. At one point, she has sex with a young American who reminds her of the Englishman, and who wants to have sex with two women. Initially she refuses, but then ends up renting a hotel room with him and another woman. There as she somewhat absent-mindedly engages in sex with the American, she finds that he is impotent, but manages to find in herself a degree of compassion for him and sees just how much he is like the Englishman – not so much in looks, but in the experience of trying to live a dream but failing miserably.