God is an Astronaut - Softcover

From the first page, I was drawn in by this gripping and winning novel. The writing is fresh, vivid, and funny, beautifully capturing the mysteries of both the cosmos and our daily lives * Madeline Miller, author of the Orange Prize winning The Song of Achilles * A witty and original novel, rich in pithy insights, gloriously spot-on with regard to the yearning middle-aged heart stalwartly beating amid the complexities family life. Lost love and lost socks co-exist here, as our engaging botanist heroine digs her way to an unexpected epiphany * Barbara Trapido * Alyson Foster's God Is An Astronaut is a page-turner and a beautiful depiction of the visual wonder of orbiting the earth. I was captivated by both the main character's predicament and Foster's masterful writing * Daphne Kalotay, bestselling author of Russian Winter and Sight Reading * Remarkable and haunting * Christian Kiefer, author of The Infinite Tides * A captivating, ingeniously-plotted book that explores the unknowability of others in a wholly new way. Through the novel's e-mails, the characters are revealed with wonderful complexity, and surprise us again and again * Karen E. Bender, author of A Town of Empty Rooms and Like Normal People * Alyson Foster is a brave writer, one I admire greatly for the intensity of her vision and her willingness to step into telling the difficult story of right now * Lydia Netzer, bestselling author of Shine Shine Shine and How to tell Toledo from the Night Sky *

The day of the accident, Jess is in the backyard with a chainsaw, clearing space to build the greenhouse she's always wanted. And, as always, she is thinking of Arthur. Arthur, her colleague in the botany department, who never believed she'd actually start the project. Arthur, who has cut off contact, escaping to the subarctic to study the pines. But now there has been a disaster, connected to Jess's husband's space tourism business: the explosion of a shuttle filled with commercial passengers, igniting a media frenzy on her family's doorstep. Jess's engineer husband is implicated, and she knows there is information he's withholding from her, even as the cameras turn to her for answers. Struggling, Jess writes to the only person she can be candid with. She writes to Arthur. And in her emails, freighted with longing, regret, and the old habits of seduction, she tries to untangle how her life has changed in one instant, but also slowly, and how it might change still. Unfolding through Jess's emails to Arthur, written in glimmering prose, this extraordinary debut is a dazzling modern-day love story.