Book Title: Atmosphere
Author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
Publisher: Hutchinson Heinemann
Publishing Date: June 2025
When I think about Taylor Jenkins Reid’s body of work before Atmosphere, her novels fell neatly into two categories. On one hand were the propulsive, high-gloss, interconnected works, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones and the Six, Malibu Rising, Carrie Soto is Back, all books that chronicled ambitious women living rough lives in the limelight, their arcs driven by extreme momentum. Even in compressed timelines, there was always a sense of forward thrust: one thing leading inexorably to another, with flashbacks and throwbacks fleshing out characters who, though vivid individually, worked even more powerfully in cohesion.
On the other hand were her quieter, earlier novels: stories built around the ordinary rhythms of life and the subtleties of love. A marriage buckling under pressure. A woman moving on after her husband goes missing. These books traded spectacle for intimacy, asking what happens to love when life intrudes in its most mundane yet devastating ways.
Atmosphere is perhaps Taylor Jenkins Reid’s most unique work to date, refusing to be boxed into either category. It stands in a league of its own, where the best reading experience comes not from tracing plot mechanics but from sitting with what this story — and these characters — seek to evoke in the reader.
Set in the 1980s, when women were only just being considered for potential astronauts, the novel follows Joan Goodwin and her fellow trainees — John Griffin, Lydia Danes, Donna Fitzgerald, Vanessa Ford — as they prepare for their first flights. And yet, to describe it as a novel about astronauts or space would be reductive.
At its core, it is also a story of forbidden love, a relationship intensified and made more precarious by the backdrop of NASA’s missions, where everything already carries heightened stakes.
“I would give you anything, if it wasn’t going to cost us everything.”
Layered into this is a meditation on perspective. What does it mean to see yourself as a speck against the immensity of the universe? How does that recognition shift the very way you inhabit your life? There is a striking moment during a mission when Joan experiences an epiphany in orbit, only to realise that the person beside her is undergoing a completely different, even opposite revelation. That divergence is the point: space alters everyone, but never in the same way.
This is a book about what it means to live through an event that alters you forever. Anyone who has experienced a few days, or even hours, that completely upended the fabric of their life — the adrenaline, the inevitability, the grief that begins before the event has even run its course — will recognise the terrain Reid is mapping here. You know, even as you’re in the thick of it, that you will never be the same, that some earlier version of yourself will be lost. Atmosphere is, in that sense, less a linear story than an extended event report of grief.
“She has her whole life to grieve. She has just a few more hours here at this console.’
The non-linear structure of the story, which starts before 1980, then jumps to the 1984 space mission, and then flashes back and forth, mirrors this emotional truth. Reid hasn’t chosen chronology because chronology cannot contain what she’s after. The time shifts are not technical gamesmanship, but an intentional way of helping the reader feel the disorientation, the immensity, and the inevitability of transformation. Everything — the fragmented sequencing, the cohesion of the crew, the detailed training — exists to serve this central reckoning: what happens when all you’ve worked for years comes crashing down?
The deeper you go into the story, the harder it is to shake the sense that Atmosphere is less a conventional narrative and more a catalogue of grief — an ongoing record of the shocks, losses, and fears that surface when life pushes you to its extreme edges.
This was a deeply intentional choice of format. By revealing the main event early on, Reid removes the lure of suspense: you’re not reading to find out what happens next. Instead, she is asking you to look harder at who it happens to. It’s almost as if the novel is shaking the reader by the shoulders, urging us to root for each of these characters, to see the human being behind the astronaut.
The flashbacks layer in the politics and power dynamics of the time, reminding us that this was only the second moment in history when women were even being considered for spaceflight. Joan Goodwin and her cohort are part of the first wave with a chance to say, “we got it all.” That weight — of history, of representation, of proving themselves — saturates every training session, every friendship, every rivalry. The camaraderie and conflicts, the push and pull between teamwork and individual ambition, even the streaks of self-absorption — all of it is magnified, and softened, by the knowledge of what lies ahead.
Because you already know the ending, the narrative forces you to read differently. You’re no longer just tallying the triumphs and missteps, but watching these people with a kind of anticipatory grief. You know where they’re headed. And if your empathy muscles are well-tuned, you may find yourself sobbing long before the final chapters.
Thank you, Random House UK, Cornerstone | Hutchinson Heinemann, for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.