Aurora 7

Book excerpt: From the beloved author of Fellow Travelers and the "master of the historical novel" (Newsweek), a soulful, engrossing novel about a space-obsessed grade-schooler who skips class to follow the flight of the Aurora 7 mission. This acclaimed novel vividly tells the story of a single day in May—May 24, 1962. While astronaut Scott Carpenter orbits the earth in his Aurora 7 capsule, the lives of a host of characters seem interwoven on the ground below—everyone from a convicted killer to a famous novelist, a New York cabdriver, a conflicted priest, and a British housewife preparing to give birth to a thalidomide-stricken baby. Above all, Aurora 7 tells the story of Gregory Noonan, a spooky suburban fifth-grader obsessed with the space program. The fate of Gregory and his family will prove mysteriously linked to the astronaut’s when the boy flees school to watch the perilous climax of Carpenter’s mission on the giant TV monitors in Grand Central Terminal. With cameos by Walter Cronkite, John F. Kennedy, and Lee Harvey Oswald, Aurora 7 is a dazzling, "gift-wrapped time capsule" (New Yorker) of a novel.