This is the second book I've read in recent months that were centered, at least partly, in the Arctic. In the first book, the frigid cold, the darkness and isolation scared me. In Good Morning, Midnight, I found the opposite: beauty, tranquility, and life. Granted, the first book was meant to scare, and I still doubt that I would venture to the North Pole, but this example shows the vastly different stories writers can reveal using the same landscape. 
 There is another love apparent within these pages, one that I am also fond of. It is what lies in the heavens beyond our planet. Those night skies lined with pinpricks of light within darkness that fills the imaginations of the young as well as the old. For Augustine, it has been a lifelong study of that endless vast from the ground. Now nearing the end of that life, he spends his last days looking from the sky to the beauty of the earth under his feet that he had once so casually ignored. For Sully, it is a journey from the other end of the telescope, an astronaut returning from Jupiter in those heavens that Augustine sets his gaze upon. 
 It is a post-apocalyptic novel in the peripheral sense only. Mostly, it is about these two lives. Both search a past with regrets, and the present to find a connection. What sets this book apart from many is the beauty in the writing. It's a story that is somehow both quiet and piercing.