Reading Skywards – Your Friendly Bookshelf

INFORMATION ABOUT THIS BOOK
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grove Press
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 2024
Format:  Hardcover, Paperback, audiobook, and ebook
Print length ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
Genre:  Literary Fiction

WHY DID I GET THIS BOOK?

I have been in Barnes and Noble a couple of times, and it is always this small section of novellas that catches my attention. There is this big sofa too, where I sat and read, and before sitting down, I looked at these books and checked which ones are available in Libby. Orbital by Samantha Harvey was available, and I also saw that this book won the Booker Prize in 2024.

MY PERSONAL OPINION OF “ORBITAL” by SAMANTHA HARVEY

I borrowed this book from Libby after seeing it in Barnes and Noble and finding out it was the Booker Prize winner in 2024. I was also motivated to read it because it is a short novel. I had no expectations and did not know the premise of the book, so I was pleasantly surprised when I started reading it: it was beautiful!. The prose was exquisite, and it draws you in paragraph after paragraph of sublime prose that streams like consciousness.

The story follows 4 astronauts and 2 cosmonauts who are stationed in space. It follows their thoughts as they orbit the Earth. It also provides information about their lives back on Earth and their backstories growing up and choosing this incredible profession.

For me, the space station became also a character, by describing the view as it orbits the Earth, mentioning continents, countries, seas, night, days, sunsets, and sunrises, and the whole of the natural beauty that can only be appreciated when in space.

I dare to say that there is no “plot” in this novel, just continuous descriptions of Earth, of interactions between the astronauts on board the station, about their lives back on Earth, and the humbling feeling of being a speck of light among this galaxy, among the universe.

PREMISE OF THE BOOK AS FOUND IN AMAZON / GOODREADS:

IA 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.

QUOTES FROM THIS BOOK

“How are we writing the future of humanity? We’re not writing anything, it’s writing us. We’re windblown leaves. We think we’re the wind, but we’re just the leaf.”

“Continents and countries come one after the other and the earth feels – not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses.”

“Maybe one day we’ll look in the mirror and be happy with the fair-to-middling upright ape that eyes us back, and we’ll gather our breath and think: OK, we’re alone, so be it. Maybe that day is coming soon. Maybe the whole nature of things is one of precariousness, of wobbling on a pinhead of being, of decentring ourselves inch by inch as we do in life, as we come to understand that the staggering extent of our own non-extent is a tumultuous and wave-tossed offering of peace.”

MY RATING: 4.3

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Samantha Harvey is the author of the novels Orbital, 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. Orbital was the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, and her other work has been 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.

Bibliography:

• The Western Wind: a Novel
• The Wilderness: a Novel
• The Shapeless Unease: A Year of No Sleeping