Jess Frobisher is a botany professor at the local university. Her husband, Liam, works for a space tourism company called Spaceco, which has just become front-page news: one of their shuttles exploded shortly after liftoff, killing everyone on board. The press descends. With the future of the company in doubt, a husband-and-wife filmmaking team approaches Liam about making a Spaceco documentary. Seeing this as an opportunity to salvage the company's reputation, Liam agrees to cooperate, allowing them access to his homelife and his family. And Jess soon becomes a focus of their film, even as--or perhaps because--she is excluded from her husband's darkest secrets. God Is an Astronaut unfolds, with sure pacing, mounting anxiety, and glimmering writing, through a series of e-mails from Jess to her colleague Arthur, away on sabbatical. He is a safe correspondent, removed from the maelstrom, but their relationship is freighted by some secrets of its own--the details slowly revealing themselves in this debut of masterful storytelling.