Author: Samantha Harvey
Year published: 2023
Category: Adult fiction (science fiction)
Pages: 244 pages
Rating: 4 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): Outer space
Summary: A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. 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.
Review: This novel won the Booker Prize last year, and someone in my in-person book group suggested it.
Talk about a locked room story, hurtling above the earth in orbit for months on end with only six people with whom to interact. I couldn't do it (for so many reasons). I liked that we learned about life on a space station, how often they circle the earth, what they can see (storms, etc), and about each astronaut/cosmonaut. And I love that it's an international effort despite what's happening back down on earth.
It got a bit dry for me as the book progressed; there wasn't enough action, and it was more of an introspective book than I usually choose. Maybe I felt this way since I just read a science fiction book (Asimov's Foundation) and a gentle read (Before the Cofee Gets Cold). I was in the mood for a story with more action.
I read one comment about the book, saying it's an elegy to Earth and the environment, and I agree with this. The way the author writes about the earth as seen from space is a love story of sorts: how it's all connected, how it works with gravity, and how the weather is part of the planet, not happening to it. I read this book on my Kindle and it tells me passages that other people underlined. Those passages really were thoughtful and well written.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Alphabet Author--H
- Alphabet Title--O
- Cover Lovers--A frame-worthy cover
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