Lily Brooks-Dalton's debut, Good Morning, Midnight, is a post-apocalyptic novel that barely mentions the apocalypse--"the last news from civilization, over a year ago, had been of war," but there's never mention of the specific calamity that seems to have overtaken the entire world. 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 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. Brooks-Dalton weaves these two seemingly disparate stories together, drawing her protagonists closer to each other by ingenious narrative and thematic means, deriving more tension from existential dread than with equipment failures.
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' gazes inward. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books