Orbital

Six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft contemplating the world below'A slim, profound study of intimate human fears set against epic vistas'GUARDIAN'Stunning... An uplifting book'SUNDAY TIMESA team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

In this slender novel, Harvey seems to have encompassed all of humanity… It is an extraordinary achievement, Orbital is entirely original, a serenely beautiful and intelligent creation, Orbital is the rarest of things, a book that satisfies both my lifelong obsession with space travel and my hunger for sentences and paragraphs that demand to be read and reread… My goodness this novel is beautiful, Stunning… The beauty of the prose engages the reader fully… An uplifting book, 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

Samantha Harvey is the author of the novels The Wilderness, All is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind and a work of non-fiction, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. Her work has been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award, the Women's Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness was awarded the Betty Trask Prize. She is a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.