Will I love Orbital?

This novel is an absolutely captivating slice of life from a perspective very few humans have ever been privileged to witness. Orbital focuses around the lives of six astronauts/cosmonauts as they orbit the earth in a space station, an amiable yet claustrophobic cheek-by-jowl existence juxtaposed against the wondrous expanse of space and the vibrant jewel of earth spinning below.

What unfolds is not so much a story as it is a series of paradoxes brough forth for our consideration: how our most treasured relationships bring us the most grief, how achievement leads inevitably to ennui, how the more we learn… show more.

The main character of this novel is Earth itself as progenitor of human ambition and achievement. It is a beautiful ode to our mother planet and the life it has cast out into space.

This writing in this book transported me. It took me out of my skin and put me on the International Space Station with the astronauts. I've never read anything quite like it.

Samantha Harvey has said that she wanted to write a sort of "space pastoral." Inspired by J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country (a book about a veteran of World War I coming back to life in the English countryside), she says she wanted to do something similar about space: "a brief, lovely homage to the natural world, pastoral writing about how deeply humans respond to our natural environments and the relationship between beauty and survival." In the end the book she wrote is quite different from Carr's book: it is an account of four astronauts and two cosmonauts over… show more.

Samantha Harvey's Orbital won the Booker Prize, and so is likely familiar to most Shepherd Books readers. I have virtually no interest in outer space but I found this story smart, moving, and complex. Like Tilt, it takes place over one day, and it took stretches between the awesomely huge (the galaxy) and the small concerns and histories of ordinary people who somehow, against many odds, became astronauts and got to experience circling the earth they love.

Like eating a delicious meal, I savoured every page slowly of this book and soaked up the incredible writing, insightful observations, and poetic descriptions of the earth, the planet, the environment and the intensity of the world in which we live. The writing is evocative and insightful, the emotions expressed created empathy and the situations moved me and shadowed many of those I feel myself.

An ode to our beautiful ailing planet

Harvey's writing is poetic and lucid. I loved learning about space and what it's like to be floating in zero gravity. More than that, I was amazed at how the book transitioned between characters and their lives on earth and the their observations of our planet from space connected to all human civilization and nature.

Imagine being an astronaut and hurtling through space for one day. Then imagine you're a phenomenal writer who not only shows you around the space ship but gives you moment by moment view of civilization below and wrestles with questions and awe-inspiring considerations about our floating planet and the meaning of love and family, where "there's no wall or barrier--no tribes, no war or corruption or particular cause of fear." A breathtaking meditation on life.

A short but powerful read that packs an extraordinary amount of emotional heft into its brief page count. By writing from the perspective of a group of people detached from the rest of the world, the book helps us make sense of our lives on the surface below.