After publishing Carrie Soto Is Again in 2022—her novel a couple of star feminine tennis participant within the Nineties—creator Taylor Jenkins Reid introduced she was taking a break. 5 of her books prior to now six years had made the New York Occasions greatest vendor listing. One in all them, Daisy Jones and the Six, was about to turn out to be a smash-hit Amazon Prime present starring Riley Keough. One other, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, simply bought to Netflix. It made sense that she would possibly want a relaxation.
However that is not why she did it.
As a substitute, she wanted a reset. Most of her books had centered round nuanced well-known girls in California and the stress between their private and non-private lives. They had been nice tales. However she had carried out these tales. Her subsequent one? She wished it to be one thing she’d by no means carried out earlier than.
Now—after two years out of the highlight—she’s speaking about her literal subsequent chapter: Ambiance, a high-stakes romance between two NASA astronauts within the Eighties. “I wished to inform a grand, epic love story,” Jenkins Reid says.
The primary character in Ambiance is Joan Goodwin, a feminine astronomer who works in NASA’s Houston Mission Management Middle. Joan is CapCom—or, the astronaut on earth who communicates with the astronauts aboard NASA’s shuttles. One launch sees her love curiosity (whom Jenkins Reid is mum about) despatched up into house. Out of the blue, one thing goes mistaken with the rocket … and Joan has to do her job amid a worldwide disaster all whereas grappling with the potential lack of the particular person she cares about most. “I simply saved considering of what it might be like for her to be down on the bottom when one of many people who she loves is up there in house—her having to speak via tips on how to handle this monumental catastrophe, whereas she is aware of that the particular person she loves could not come house,” Jenkins Reid says. “I wished so badly to inform a narrative that was life or dying, the place the stakes had been so rapid—and we understood that it won’t all the time go the best way that we wish it to go. There’s one thing stunning to be discovered on this heightened second.”
