Daisy Jones and the Six Author Taylor Jenkins Reid Is Back With a New Book: Atmosphere

Products are independently selected by our editors. We may earn an affiliate commission from links.

After publishing Carrie Soto Is Back in 2022—her novel about a star female tennis player in the 1990s—author Taylor Jenkins Reid announced she was taking a break. Five of her books in the past six years had made the New York Times best seller list. One of them, Daisy Jones and the Six, was about to become a smash-hit Amazon Prime show starring Riley Keough. Another, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, just sold to Netflix. It made sense that she might need a rest.

But that’s not why she did it.

Instead, she needed a reset. Most of her books had centered around nuanced famous women in California and the tension between their public and private lives. They were great stories. But she had done those stories. Her next one? She wanted it to be something she’d never done before.

Now—after two years out of the spotlight—she’s talking about her literal next chapter: Atmosphere, a high-stakes romance between two NASA astronauts in the 1980s. “I wanted to tell a grand, epic love story,” Jenkins Reid says.

The main character in Atmosphere is Joan Goodwin, a female astronomer who works in NASA’s Houston Mission Control Center. Joan is CapCom—or, the astronaut on earth who communicates with the astronauts aboard NASA’s shuttles. One launch sees her love interest (whom Jenkins Reid is mum about) sent up into space. Suddenly, something goes wrong with the rocket … and Joan has to do her job amid a global crisis all while grappling with the potential loss of the person she cares about most. “I just kept thinking of what it would be like for her to be down on the ground when one of the people that she loves is up there in space—her having to talk through how to manage this monumental disaster, while she knows that the person she loves may not come home,” Jenkins Reid says. “I wanted so badly to tell a story that was life or death, where the stakes were so immediate—and we understood that it might not always go the way that we want it to go. There’s something beautiful to be found in this heightened moment.”

Taylor Jenkins Reid

Photo: Michael Buckner

While Jenkins Reid usually sets her stories in Southern California, where she lives, this time, she embedded herself in Houston for several months. “Instead of the story coming to me, I had to go to Houston and tour the Space Center—and get to know NASA on its own terms,” she says.

Then, she studied. A lot. Maybe even more than she’d ever done in her entire life.“The first thing that I knew that I had to do was start to understand astronauts, their lives, what motivates them, what their day-to-day looks like, and how the Space Shuttle program actually worked,” she said. “That was incredibly fascinating—but it was a big stretch for my very artistic brain to understand a lot of the science that goes on just to getting the shuttle up into the air.” She read The New Guys, a book about never-before-told story of NASA’s 1978 astronaut class. Then, she dove into The Six, which told the story of NASA’s first female astronauts. Next was Shuttle, Houston—the biography of Paul Dye, who was the longest-serving Flight Director in NASA’s history. She reached out to Dye, and he soon began an integral part of the Atmosphere’s creative process: “I was really, really fortunate that he spent hours and hours of his time explaining to me how Mission Control works, how the shuttle works, and how I could piece together what I was trying to do,” Jenkins Reid says. She also consulted Jeffrey Kluger, the author of Apollo 13.

Jenkins Reid usually sets her work in the past, picking a decade that is particular to the cultural fabric her character is wrapped in. Atmosphere is no exception: 1981 saw the launch of the first space shuttle. (Its journey was covered by every major network include MTV.) Two years later, Sally Ride became the first woman to travel into space. Meanwhile, in 1986, the world was sent into shock after the Challenger explosion. It was a time where space captivated the minds, dreams, and sorrows of the American people.

Why call it Atmosphere? “The atmosphere is what makes it so that the earth is suitable for human life,” Jenkins Reid explains. “So the atmosphere is life. That’s what keeps humans alive here on Earth and thus is the meaning of life.”

Atmosphere publishes on June 3, 2025. It is available for pre-order now.