Toronto-born Sara Seager has made it her life's work to search for exoplanets outside our solar system, hoping to find the one-in-a-billion world enough like ours to sustain life. But with the unexpected death of her husband, her life became an empty, lightless space. Suddenly, she was the single mother of two young boys, a widow at forty, clinging to three crumpled pages of instructions her husband had written for things like grocery shopping--things he had done while she did pioneering work as a planetary scientist at MIT. She became painfully aware of her Asperger's, feeling alone in the universe for the first time ever. In this honest memoir, Seager tells the story of how, as she attempted to navigate the world of grief. While she continuted looking for other planetary worlds, she discovered something just as wondrous: other people, reaching out across the space of her grief. Among them are the Widows of Concord and her beloved sons, Max and Alex. Most unexpected of all, there is another kind of one-in-a-billion match with an amateur astronomer. Equally attuned to the wonders of deep space and human connection, The Smallest Lights in the Universe is its own light in the dark.