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.