The Fault in Our Stars Summary

The Fault in Our Stars has 25 chapters, untitled and simply numbered, with no prologue and no epilogue. Hazel narrates all of it in the first person, in the past tense — she is telling this after Augustus's death, which is why she can comment in chapter thirteen that you have a choice about how to tell sad stories.

The front matter is worth reading rather than skipping. In order it runs: the dedication, which is three words, TO ESTHER EARL; an epigraph that is a fake quotation from a book that does not exist, spoken by the Dutch Tulip Man; and an Author's Note in which Green pre-empts the question everyone was going to ask him. It reads, in part: this is not so much an author's note as an author's reminder of what was printed in small type a few pages ago — this book is a work of fiction, I made it up, and neither novels nor their readers benefit from attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story.

The hardcover runs 313 pages, and every copy of the first printing of 150,000 is signed, because Green signed the printed sheets by hand before they were bound.

This The Fault in Our Stars summary opens the way the book does: late in the winter of her seventeenth year, Hazel's mother decided she was depressed. Hazel's own diagnosis is sharper — depression is not a side effect of cancer, depression is a side effect of dying.

She was diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer at thirteen, with what she calls an impressive and long-settled satellite colony in her lungs, and told it was incurable. Then an experimental drug called Phalanxifor worked on her when it fails in most people, the tumours shrank, and they stayed shrunk. She has been living on borrowed and uncertain time ever since, out of school, taking community college classes, wheeling a small green oxygen cylinder behind her.

The support group meets in the basement of a church built in the shape of a cross, in the exact spot where the heart of Jesus would be — which is why Augustus calls it the Literal Heart of Jesus. It is run by Patrick, a survivor whose cancer took both his testicles and who tells the same story every week. Hazel goes because her mother makes her.

Augustus Waters turns up to support his friend Isaac, who is about to lose his remaining eye to cancer. Augustus is a former basketball player, walks on a prosthetic, and when Patrick asks what he fears, he says oblivion. Hazel, who never speaks, tells him it is going to happen to everyone and he should ignore it — an idea she got from her favourite book. He tells her she looks like Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta and invites her over to watch it.

In the church parking lot he puts an unlit cigarette between his teeth and she is furious until he explains. They do not kill you unless you light them, he says, and he has never lit one; it is a metaphor — you put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you do not give it the power to do its killing. It is the purest example of how he operates: everything is a performance about control, and Green has pointed out that he never actually gets the cigarettes at the end.

They trade books. She gives him An Imperial Affliction by Peter Van Houten; he gives her a novelisation of his favourite video game, in which the hero kills 118 people in 284 pages. An Imperial Affliction is narrated by a girl called Anna who has a rare blood cancer and refuses to be inspirational about it, and whose mother, a professional gardener obsessed with tulips, falls for a possibly fraudulent Dutch tulip trader. And then, just as everything is about to happen, the book stops in the middle of a sentence.

Hazel understands the literary point — Anna has died or become too ill to write — and does not care. What she needs to know is what happens to the people left behind, above all Anna's mother, because she has heard her own mother sob "I won't be a mom anymore" through a wall, and she describes herself as a grenade with limited time before it goes off. Augustus tracks down Van Houten's assistant, Lidewij, and gets an email correspondence going. Van Houten replies at length, erudite and evasive, and says he can only answer in person.

Augustus solves that by spending his wish from the Genie Foundation on taking her to Amsterdam. Hazel used hers at thirteen, on Disney World, which he considers close to unforgivable.

Then she nearly dies. Fluid fills her lungs, she spends days in the ICU, and Augustus waits outside the whole time without being let in. At a meeting of her doctors afterwards, one of them literally laughs at the idea of the trip. Dr Maria does not. They have oxygen on planes, she says, and when the objection comes that this puts one of the most promising Phalanxifor survivors eight hours from her care team, she shrugs, acknowledges the risk, and turns to Hazel: but it's your life. The argument that wins is not medical.

Amsterdam gives the book its three best scenes in a row. At a canal-side restaurant called Oranjee, booked on Van Houten's tab, a waiter tells them Dom Pérignon called out to his fellow monks that he was tasting the stars, and then says: we have bottled all the stars this evening, my young friends. Augustus admits the suit he is wearing is the one he bought for his own funeral. Then the meeting with Van Houten, who turns out to be a bitter alcoholic drinking Scotch at breakfast, with eighteen years of unopened fan mail in two garbage bags behind the sofa. He refuses to answer anything, lectures them about Zeno's tortoise, disavows his own book on the grounds that the characters are fictional and nothing happens after the last page, and then turns genuinely cruel — telling Hazel she is a side effect of evolution and that sick children are arrested in development. She slaps the drink out of his hand. Lidewij resigns on the spot, in tears, and then takes them to the Anne Frank House herself.

There is no lift. Hazel climbs it anyway, hauling the oxygen up flight after flight, nearly passing out, going up eighteen more steps because she felt she owed it to a girl who was dead when she was not. In the attic, with a video of Otto Frank playing, she and Augustus kiss for the first time, and the other tourists applaud.

That night he tells her the rest. A PET scan shortly before the trip lit up: the osteosarcoma is back and has spread everywhere. He stopped chemotherapy in order to make the trip. He feels he conned her into loving a healthy person. When she says it is not fair, he gives her the line the book keeps coming back to — the world is not a wish-granting factory — and then breaks down and promises to fight it.

Augustus dies. Everything after Amsterdam is the machinery of that, and Hazel refuses to make it dignified: he ends up, in her words, a desperate humiliated creature in place of the boy she fell for.

The worst of it is a gas station at 2:35 in the morning. Her phone rings and she assumes it is the call. It is him, alone in his car, covered in vomit, having driven out to buy cigarettes by himself because he had lost his pack. His feeding tube is damaged and infected and he cannot take his medication. He begs her not to call for help; she calls anyway. Crying, he asks where his chance is to be somebody's Peter Van Houten, to make something that outlasts him. She kneels next to the car and tells him she wishes life were like the movies with good guys and bad guys, but cancer is not a villain — it just wants to be alive. She promises to get him his cigarettes, and reads him a poem until the ambulance comes. He never gets them.

Then he phones and asks her to come to the Literal Heart of Jesus at eight, and, if it is not too much trouble, to prepare a eulogy. He wants to attend his own funeral. Isaac goes first, calling him a self-aggrandising bastard and saying he would refuse robot eyes rather than live in a world without him, and Augustus interrupts to correct the arithmetic — seventeen years, not eighteen. Hazel refuses to tell their love story, because it should die with them, and talks about maths instead: there are infinite numbers between zero and one, and a bigger infinity between zero and two, and she cannot say how grateful she is for their little infinity. You gave me a forever within the numbered days.

Augustus Waters died eight days after his prefuneral, at Memorial, in the ICU, when the cancer, which was made of him, finally stopped his heart, which was also made of him. His mother phones at half past three in the morning. Hazel calls Isaac, and then realises the only person she wants to talk to about it is Augustus. On his Facebook wall she writes that he did not die after a lengthy battle with cancer but after a lengthy battle with human consciousness.

At the funeral she takes off her cannula, puts her hand on his chest, says I love you present tense, and slips the pack of cigarettes into the coffin — keeping the promise from the gas station, and telling him he can light them now, she does not mind. Behind her, unexpectedly, is Peter Van Houten, who has flown in because Augustus wrote and demanded it, and who says of the minister's talk about being healed and whole in heaven: what a load of horse crap, eh, Kid. In the car afterwards he explains himself at last. He had a daughter. She was eight. She died of leukemia, very much like Anna, and the book Hazel treated as scripture was a father's account of his own child's death, and the refusal to write an epilogue was not a theory about fiction but a man who could not look at it. He also gives her the coldest line in the book: grief does not change you, it reveals you. She throws him out of the car anyway.

Isaac mentions that Augustus had been writing something for her. His father finds a notebook by the hospital bed with pages torn out. Hazel searches the church and finds nothing. Then her friend Kaitlyn makes the leap — maybe the pages were not written for Hazel but sent to Van Houten. Hazel emails Lidewij, who goes to his house, finds the letter, and gets him to read it by telling him he owes it to his own daughter to read a letter from another dead child. He says he has nothing to add. She scans it and sends it on. The handwriting and the changing ink show it was written over several days, in and out of consciousness.

It is a request that Van Houten help turn his notes into a eulogy for Hazel. Augustus says that everyone wants to leave a mark, but the marks humans leave are too often scars, and that people are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants in a ridiculous attempt to survive their deaths. Hazel is different: she will be loved deeply but not widely, and that is not sad but triumphant, because the real heroes are the people noticing things. He confesses that after his scan lit up he snuck into the ICU and held her hand for ten minutes, and for about a second was good enough to hope she would die first so she would never know he was going too. Then he wanted more time so they could fall in love, and got his wish, and left his scar.

The letter ends: 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. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers. Beneath it, Hazel answers — I do, Augustus. I do.

Those are the last words of the novel, and they are a marriage vow spoken across a death. Hazel does not die. She is alive on the last page, still terminal, still on Phalanxifor. And note the shape of it: Van Houten refused her an epilogue, and Augustus wrote her one.

The most-quoted lines from The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, with the attributions people usually get wrong:

"As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once."

"Maybe okay will be our always."

"That's the thing about pain," Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. "It demands to be felt."

"Some infinities are bigger than other infinities."

"The world," he said, "is not a wish-granting factory."

"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. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."

The first is Hazel narrating, not dialogue, and it happens in her living room while Augustus reads to her, not on the plane. The third is Augustus speaking a line he is quoting from An Imperial Affliction — the novel says so explicitly, and Green has told a reader who praised it that he did not write it, Peter Van Houten did. The fourth is Van Houten's first, in a lecture about Zeno and Cantor; Hazel borrows it later for her eulogy, and her example of it is deliberately wrong mathematically. The last is Augustus writing to Van Houten, and almost every version online drops old man and cuts the final sentence, which is the setup for the book's closing words.

One more correction worth having: "Okay? Okay." is not in the novel at all. It is the 2014 film's tagline. The book has "Maybe okay will be our always", said on the phone, and the word okay is italicised rather than in quotation marks. Similarly, "That's a thing about pain" is the film's wording; the book says "the thing".