Good Morning, Midnight

June 27, 2016
In Brooks-Dalton’s (Motorcycles I’ve Loved) ambitious debut novel, the human population of Earth has gone silent, “as if there were no radio transmitters left in the world, or perhaps no souls to use them.” At the Arctic’s Barbeau Obervatory, renowned curmudgeon and astronomer Augustine, nearing 80, chooses to stay behind as his colleagues depart from the research station (in response to the unspecified crisis) so he can live out his life untethered from society. When he discovers Iris, a young girl “left behind like a forgotten piece of luggage,” Augustine’s life—and his uninterrupted opportunity to “quantify the guts of infinity, to look back into the dawn of time and glimpse the very beginning”—gets complicated. At the same time, the six-person crew of the Aether, the first manned flight to explore Jupiter and its moons, turns back toward Earth. Neither Augustine nor the crew of the Aether know what fate has befallen humanity, only that their entreaties remain unanswered, as if sentient life had never existed. When Augustine, a ham-radio enthusiast, catches the attention of Sully, the Aether’s communications specialist, the two converse briefly. But time and space conspire to separate the planet’s last remaining inhabitants. Brooks-Dalton’s prose lights up the page in great swathes, her dialogue sharp and insightful, and the high-concept plot drives a story of place, elusive love, and the inexorable yearning for human contact. Although the book’s two parallel threads often read less like a novel than a pair of expertly crafted—if only tangentially related—novellas, the memorable characters explore complex questions that resonate with the urgency of a glimpse into the void.

June 1, 2016
Two scientists in remote locations must navigate the sudden loss of human life on Earth.Augustine is one of the world's top astronomers. In his late 70s, he is completing a final research project, stationed at the Barbeau Observatory in the Arctic Circle, "the landscape that matched his interior." Having neglected all his loved ones in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, Augie finds himself alone in the polar tundra after refusing to be evacuated with other scientists during a global emergency. Soon after he's left alone, he finds a young girl, Iris, who appears to have been inadvertently left behind. As the two attempt to adjust to life as, very possibly, the last humans on Earth, another story unfolds millions of miles away: the six-person crew of the Aether, a manned mission to Jupiter, is on its way back to Earth after a successful trip to study the giant planet. Sully, the astronaut in charge of communications, must try to figure out why all signals from Earth have suddenly ceased. Like Augie, she has also jettisoned family for science. However, as the parallel narratives unspool, both Augie and Sully find solace in their austere locales and in the relationships they forge with their companions at the edges of the world. Brooks-Dalton (Motorcycles I've Loved, 2015) is a writer who loves grand gestures, and she's at her best when writing about the epic settings that anchor the book, as the arctic and deep space give Brooks-Dalton outlets that match her scope. However, both the plot and the writing itself frequently fall into this same grandiosity: when an apocalypse is the least dramatic part of a novel, one wonders if Brooks-Dalton might have gotten the same amount of punch with less extravagance. An apocalyptic soap opera set in vividly imagined environments.

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July 1, 2016
Far to the north of Canada, in the land of the midnight sun, Augustine searches the radio waves for signs of human activity. Over a year ago, when the remote observatory was evacuated, the brilliant astronomer stayed behind. Now he may be the only human left on earth, except for Iris, the strange girl he found hiding in a dorm room after the last planes departed. At the same time, a manned space flight is returning from a two-year exploration of Jupiter's moons. Sullivan, the mission specialist, has been unable to reach their team back on earth. As they near their home destination and the crew grows increasingly concerned, Sully dwells on her failed marriage and the daughter she left behind. Faced with an uncertain future, both Sully and Augustine seek meaning and redemption in their pasts, and dare to find hope. Beautiful descriptions create a sense of wonder and evoke feelings of desolation while Brooks-Dalton's heartfelt debut novel unfolds at a perfect pace as it asks readers what will be left when everything in the world is gone.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)