"Orbital" by Samantha Harvey

This may be the most most luxuriantly descriptive book I have ever read.

It chronicles twenty-four hours (16 orbits) in the life of four astronauts and two cosmonauts living on a decrepit space station as another spaceship wings its way towards a moon  landing and a super-typhoon destroys Pacific islands. They go about their extraordinary ordinary lives while gazing down on their home planet below, witnessing sixteen sunsets and sixteen nightfalls. This out-of-this-world perspective enables both extravagantly gorgeous prose and some thought-provoking asides.

Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize. 

Magnificent.

Selected quotes:

• “Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.” (Orbit minus 1)
• “A hand-span away beyond a skin of metal the universe unfolds in simple eternities.” (Orbit minus 1)
• “Is the subject art itself (which is a set of Illusions and tricks and artifices within life), or life itself (which is a set of Illusions and tricks and artifices within a consciousness that is trying to understand life through perceptions and dreams and art)?” (Orbit 1, ascending)
• “All beings are living in life-support machines commonly called bodies and all of these will fail eventually.” (Orbit 3, ascending)
• “Maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn't ask to be alive, we didn't ask to inherit an earth to look after, and we didn't ask to be so completely unjustly darkly alone.” (Orbit 4, ascending)
• “It's easier to have nothing much to lose than to keep losing something.” (Orbit 4,descending)
• “The sun's particle clouds billow, flares explode and whip earthward in eight minutes flat, energy pulses, explodes, a great ball of fusion and fury.” (Orbit 10)
• “That's what we're doing when we come into space, asserting our species by extending its territory” (Orbit 11)
• “She's living inside the working of a clock and it’s grinding time through her bones.” (Orbit 11)
• “Time moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly insensate to our preference for living.” (Orbit 13)
• “They see someone's dog washed down the street in two metres of soupy thing-thronged water, and the dog’s someone following promptly after it.” (Orbit 14, ascending) Thing-thronged? Thing-thronged!

December 2024; 136 pages

First published by Jonathan Cape in 2023

My Vintage paperback edition was issued in 2024.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God