Lily Brooks-Dalton's debut, Good Morning, Midnight, is a post-apocalyptic novel that barely mentions the apocalypse. According to one of its protagonists, "the last news from civilization, over a year ago, had been of war," but there's never any mention of the specific calamity that seems to have overtaken almost the entire world simultaneously. Brooks-Dalton instead focuses her attention on characters already at the fringes of human civilization, struggling to deal with the utter isolation of a mysteriously quiet earth.
The narrative toggles back and forth between Augustine, an elderly astronomer, alone in an Arctic observatory except for a quiet young girl named Iris, and the crew of the Aether, a spaceship making the lengthy return trip to Earth after completing a groundbreaking survey of Jupiter and its moons. Mission Specialist Sullivan, or "Sully," is one of the astronauts on board, consumed by confusion and fear after Mission Control abruptly goes silent. Part of the fun of the novel is seeing how Brooks-Dalton manages to weave these two seemingly disparate stories together, drawing her protagonists closer to each other by ingenious narrative and thematic means. Unlike plot-oriented science fiction novels such as The Martian, Good Morning, Midnight derives more tension from existential dread than dealing with equipment failures.
Lily Brooks-Dalton puts much of her writerly energies into introspection, having her protagonists delve deep into their copious emotional baggage. Before the calamity, Augustine and Sully preferred to focus on the stars rather than relationships, a course that left both of them with plenty of regrets. Here, at the end of the world, Brooks-Dalton turns her protagonists' gaze inward. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books