Summary and Reviews of Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Media Reviews

Boston Globe Samantha Harvey's meditative novel portraying life aboard a spacecraft contains on almost every page sentences so gorgeous that you want to put down the book in awe ... A thrilling book, filled with marvel at the beauty of creation made palpable in bravura descriptions ... The sense of wonder and delight conveyed by Harvey's elegant prose and philosophical musings makes this a deeply pleasurable book for serious fiction lovers.

Library Journal (starred review) This is a beautifully written, deeply thoughtful meditation on planet Earth and our place in it.

Los Angeles Times Harvey manages, in taking readers along to the final frontier, to remind us less of our essential loneliness and more of our mutual dependence ... With a few tiny strokes of foreshadowing and a few lovely paragraphs of description, Harvey manages to bring readers back down to Earth, astounded that they've traveled so far in such a short period of time, having finished their own orbit through the realms of her rich imagination.

Minneapolis Star Tribune Harvey vividly renders the practical and emotional details of life in space, from the cargo cubes that contain trash to the talismans and images each astronaut has brought on board ... Perhaps the most important aspect of the book is its interpretation of the experience of seeing Earth from outer space ... If Harvey meant Orbital as a tiny, 200-page chance to consider it all from a different perspective, her clarion call could not have come at a better time.

New York Times Ravishingly beautiful.

Oprah Daily A meditative novel that reveals our changing planet with a new urgency, and its inhabitants with a new and profound love.

Shelf Awareness Radiant ... With Orbital, Harvey gives readers a powerful novel that, in less than 200 pages, manages to explore questions of philosophy and religion, faith, existence, meaning-making, art, grief, and gratitude, just to name a few. In showing one day in the lives of just six individuals, she probes deep into the human experience as it teeters between the profound and the mundane—even, or perhaps especially, as experienced from the rarified vantage point of space. Her luscious and lyrical language is as close to poetry as it is to prose ... Orbital is a gift of language, a meditation on meaning, and a beautiful exploration of perspective.

Space Review A fascinating character study of the multinational crew, both as individuals and of their interpersonal dynamics ... Orbital excels because it combines the mundane with the profound aspects of living and working in space.

The New Yorker Samantha Harvey, one of the most consistently surprising contemporary British novelists, becomes something like the cosmic artificer of our era with her slim, enormous novel Orbital (Grove), which imaginatively constructs the day-to-day lives of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Orbital is the strangest and most magical of projects, not least because it's barely what most people would call a novel but performs the kind of task that only a novel could dare ... Harvey, writing like a kind of Melville of the skies, finds that fitting surplus again and again.

The New Yorker These days, when I read books like Samantha Harvey's Orbital, my brain explodes. I'm filled with such awe and inspiration, and I think: This! How do you do this?! Maybe this is how I'm evolving as a writer. But I'm open to it, and gleefully want to step into that room.

Daily Mail (UK) Gorgeous ... An intensely charged reading experience, sustained by the sensory thrill of Harvey's imaginative attention to detail.

Financial Times (UK) A clarion call for our planet through existential awe ... In contrast to the bleak apocalyptic tone of much contemporary climate fiction, Orbital's luminous descriptions remind us of the beauty at stake when humanity plays fast and loose with our single, and singular, blue marble.

Irish Times (UK) Orbital is not only a timely meditation but an essential one. [Harvey's] best novel to date.

Physics World (UK) Quietly philosophical, tackling some of the biggest questions humanity has ever asked ... Orbital is as accessible and educational as the best of popular science. It's a feat almost as astonishing as the existence of the ISS.

Telegraph (UK) Slim, soulful, and haunting ... [Harvey's] descriptive powers are second to none.

The Guardian (UK) Harvey makes an ecstatic voyage with an imagined crew on the International Space Station, and looks back to Earth with a lover's eye ... An Anthropocene book resistant to doom.

The Sunday Times (UK) Powerful ... The strength of this book lies in Harvey's stunning and rhythmic descriptions of this constantly unraveling world ... She moves unnervingly between the intimate and the epic, while subtly unpicking the essential threads that bind them ... The beauty of the prose engages the reader fully and, overall, this is an uplifting book. Like the astronauts, the reader is left with no firm foothold. We nevertheless come to understand the words 'Mother Earth' in new and positive ways. And Harvey reassures us that, although the world may seem fragile, 'no negligible thing could shine so bright.'

Times Literary Supplement (UK) Orbital, Harvey's fifth novel, is The Waves in space ... Over the sixteen orbits tracked by the novel, dazzling descriptions of the planet rhythmically recur ... Characters' thoughts mix and flow with the colours and light.

Booklist (starred review) Luminous and profound, Orbital is hard to put down and even harder to forget.

Publishers Weekly (starred review) 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.

Kirkus Reviews [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.

The Booker Prize Judges "Samantha Harvey's compact yet beautifully expansive novel invites us to observe Earth's splendour from the drifting perspective of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they navigate bereavement, loneliness and mission fatigue. Moving from the claustrophobia of their cabins to the infinitude of space, from their wide-ranging memories to their careful attention to their tasks, from searching metaphysical inquiry to the spectacle of the natural world, Orbital offers us a love letter to our planet as well as a deeply moving acknowledgement of the individual and collective value of every human life.

Reader Reviews

Anthony Conty
Why Space Travel? Here's Why...
'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey, with its 207 pages, is a thought-provoking journey that does not pretend to be something it is not. It takes us into the minds of astronauts and cosmonauts as they float around the Earth, sharing their profound thoughts ...   Read More

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