Name: Orbital
SKU: 56326996
Price: 26.27 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Samantha Harvey

Type

Physical Book

Author

Samantha Harvey

Publisher

Grove Press

Language

English

Pages

224

Format

Paperback

ISBN13

9780802163622

Synopsis "Orbital"

A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space--not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. 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. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live. Profound, contemplative and gorgeous, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and a moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet.

Samantha Harvey

(Author)

View Author's Page

Samantha Harvey (Kent in 1975) is a British novelist. Her work covers themes such as memory, identity, and spirituality, explored with lyrical and evocative prose. Her first novel, The Wilderness (2009), won the Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Guardian First Book Award.

Among her most notable works are All Is Song (2012), Dear Thief (2014), and The Western Wind (2018). In 2024, Harvey won the Booker Prize for her novel Orbital, a space epic that narrates the reflections of six astronauts at the International Space Station over 24 hours. In addition to her novels, she has published a non-fiction work titled The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping (2020), where she addresses her experience with insomnia.

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