Atmosphere: A GMA Book Club Pick A Love Story

by Anne Hart

This is narrative nonfiction about the actual women married to NASA astronauts during the Space Race era, and it captures that same electric tension between personal ambition and institutional pressure that Reid explores through Joan. Koppel writes with the novelistic flair of a storyteller—you get the camaraderie, the sacrifice, and the very real human stakes behind the mission patches, which will deepen your appreciation for what Reid was doing with her fictional crew.

by Shelby Van Pelt

Birkwood weaves together a contemporary love story with a 1960s flashback about a woman scientist whose career was derailed by circumstance and choice—so you get that same meditation on how women navigate ambition, love, and institutional barriers that Reid captures, but told through two timelines that gradually illuminate each other. The emotional architecture is quieter than Atmosphere, but the questions about what we sacrifice and why are just as piercing.

by Matt Haig

Here's your surprise pick: it's speculative fiction rather than historical, but it's fundamentally about the same question that haunts Joan—what if I'd made different choices? what does my life mean in the context of all the lives I might have lived? Haig uses magical realism to explore regret and possibility in a way that feels earned rather than sentimental, and there's a similar sense of wonder about the vastness of existence that Reid captures through astronomy.

by Tom Wolfe

Published in 1979, just before Reid's narrative begins, Wolfe's classic gives you the cultural and masculine mythology that Joan and her cohort are up against—the test pilot culture, the competition, the mythology of the astronaut. Reading this alongside Atmosphere creates a fascinating dialogue about how Reid is deliberately reframing the Space Age narrative through women's eyes and interior lives, rather than the swagger and ego Wolfe chronicles.

by Bonnie Ohye

Like Joan, Elizabeth Zott is a woman scientist navigating a male-dominated field in the mid-20th century, but Garmus tells her story with warmth and humor alongside the institutional resistance. The novel shares Reid's gift for making you feel the specific texture of a woman's ambition—the small humiliations, the unexpected allies, the way love complicates rather than resolves the central question of who you're allowed to be.