Halfway through the story, Devi dies in an accident: her suit's breathing system fails while she and Sullivan make repairs to the space station's exterior.

Near the end of the book, Augustine and Iris take a near-suicide journey to another station farther away from their current one, where there's a more powerful radio antenna to try to communicate with the rest of the world.

The novel's last page reveals that astronaut Sullivan is the daughter Augustine abandoned in the past, and the little girl in the Arctic is his hallucination.

[5]In another interview with the Chicago Review of Books, Brooks-Dalton explained that one of her inspirations was exploring gender roles in parenthood and the differences between how men and women feel guilt over the abandonment of their children: The expectations of what women should value and what they are responsible for have permeated our culture for so long that it makes me wonder: if we all woke up in a totally different society tomorrow, would these gender disparities still exist?

[6]In addition to the narrative interspersed between post-apocalyptic Earth and the space station, certain parts of Good Morning, Midnight also go back in time to tell the past of Augustine and Sullivan.

In a 2016 interview, she justified her choice: For me and for this story specifically, the minutia of whether humanity falls by way of epidemic or warfare or asteroid or climate change was so much less interesting than what happens after.

I wanted to keep the focus on the characters, to detail the emotional and psychological toll of such a catastrophe without dropping into the mechanics of how the world might continue in the wake of it.

[5] Unlike the film adaptation released four years later, the novel ends without Augustine and Sullivan ever knowing they are father and daughter.

About this decision to keep the characters' identities a secret shared only with readers, the author explained: In the first draft I think they did figure it out — maybe not both of them, but I think Augustine at least knew.

Unlike the book, the space mission is returning from an expedition to Jupiter that aimed to investigate conditions for humanity to colonize one of the planet's moons.