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Orbital by Samantha Harvey
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This is the Truro Waterstones Book Club pick for December 2024 or I would never ever have read it. So thank you to everybody at the book club.
Everyone says this is a beautiful book and it is. The cover manages to look spacey but eschewing death-rays and spaceships. In fact the cover is perfect for the book.
Inside it’s outstandingly gorgeous: a book full of numbers, litanies of lists, colours, smells, feelings and wonderful flashing metaphors. It’s more a prose poem than anything else, with a Grendel of hard vacuum and radiation outside the space station, lying in wait in the dark and light.
Not much happens in a very intense way: the astronauts and cosmonauts are busy all the time doing experiments. The laboratory mice go from terror at being weightless to joyful flying inside their cage, accepting the utter change in their world and loving it. They don’t know that they’ll die soon to provide data about how to avoid the wasting of weightlessness — but perhaps for mice who can fly, it’ll be worth it?
The astronauts and cosmonauts in the space station know more about the world they’re flying around in a series of looping orbits that carpet the globe. They too rejoice in the staggering beauty of the Earth seen from a little above her skin.
