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by Samantha Harvey
A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space - not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet.
Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live.
Profound, contemplative and gorgeous, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and a moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet.
"Harvey's beautiful latest follows a space station's six crew members as they orbit Earth over the course of a nine-month mission...Harvey suggests that her characters all share various abstract ideas about the planet, which she conveys with lovely lyrical prose...This gorgeous meditation leaves readers feeling as if they're floating in the same 'dark unswimmable sea.'" —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This is a beautifully written, deeply thoughtful meditation on planet Earth and our place in it." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Luminous and profound, Orbital is hard to put down and even harder to forget." —Booklist (starred review)
"[T]he book can feel ponderous at times, especially in the middle—but Harvey's deliberate slowed-down time and repetitions are entirely the point. Like the astronauts, we are forced to meditate on the notion that 'not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it's…a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre.' Is this a crisis or an opportunity? Harvey treats this question as both a narrative and an existential dilemma. Elegiac and elliptical, this slim novel is a sobering read." —Kirkus Reviews
"Samantha Harvey is a beautiful stylist; in Orbital a group of astronauts look down on our fragile Earth. It's a slim, profound study of intimate human fears set against epic vistas of swirling weather patterns and rolling continents." —Guardian (UK)
"A radiant explosion of a novel." —Jamie Quatro, author of Fire Sermon
"One of the most beautiful novels I have read in a very long time." —Mark Haddon, author of The Porpoise
"This is such a beautiful book you have to adjust your readerly heart to take it all in. The plot is simply and extraordinarily our planet, watched by a handful of souls. Orbital wonders what it's like to be a human 'with a godly view' and because Samantha Harvey is such a spectacular prose stylist the wondering takes the form of breathtaking colour storms and brilliant encircling epiphanies of time and scale, technology and love, ambition and faith. It is an awe-inspiring and humbling love letter to Earth and those who reckon with the gift of it." —Max Porter, author of Shy
This information about Orbital was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels, Orbital, The Western Wind, Dear Thief, All Is Song, and The Wilderness, which won the Betty Trask Prize, and one work of nonfiction, The Shapeless Unease. Her books have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, and the James Tait Black Prize, as well as longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize. She lives in Bath, UK, and teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.
Libby Lost and Found
by Stephanie Booth
Libby Lost and Found is a book for people who don't know who they are without the books they love.
The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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