Book Review: Orbital

Orbital
By Samantha Harvey
Audio version, 6 hrs

Read by Sarah Naudi
Copyright 2023

This book was the winner of the Booker Prize in 2024 and winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize. It was also shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

Orbital is poetic novel about 24 hours in the life of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station (although it is never called that). The mission is one of the last space station missions before the station is to be decommissioned and eventually ditched into the ocean.

The six are from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan. There are two women and four men. They travel around the earth 16 times a day, going 17,000 miles an hour above our blue dot.

The author gives us glimpses into the lives of these space explorers but also shows what is going on beneath them - a typhon near the Philippines, clouds of dust across deserts, the dots of cities along the coastal areas.

And out another window are constellations, galaxies, and worlds yet unthought of.

Below them and then beside them, another rocket blasts off from earth, with astronauts headed toward the moon this time.

This could have been boring, and at first, I was afraid I was going to be put off by the reader, but I decided to give it a shot. I'm so glad I did. I found it fascinating. The writing was extraordinary, very lyrical and poetic, with a sentence structure that was calming. I enjoyed getting to know the astronauts a little, and then the widening expanse of the view of the world, then a dip into the microcosm of some portion thereof.

This is not a book I would have picked up normally, but I am glad I did. I was looking for something short I wait on a hold for a longer audio book.

It's good to explore what's out there.