May 2026 Book, Orbital

 

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 5:30 at Guilford Free Library. All are welcome to join in the discussion. If this book interests you, contact the library for a copy.

"Samantha Harvey, one of the most consistently surprising contemporary British novelists, becomes something like the cosmic artificer of our era with her slim, enormous novel Orbital, which imaginatively constructs the day-to-day lives of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Orbital is the strangest and most magical of projects, not least because it’s barely what most people would call a novel but performs the kind of task that only a novel could dare. It’s barely a novel because it barely tells a plotted set of human stories, and the stories it does tell barely interact with one another....But this minimal fictionality is not really the point; it’s merely the ransom paid to the genre in order to resemble the novelistic. The point is everything else: the almost unimaginable unworldliness of the situation ... The real point of Orbital is the demonstration of how a writer might capture this spectacular strangeness in language adequate to the spectacle. And how she might do so with fitting surplus, in ways that surpass the more orderly permissions of journalism and nonfictional prose. Harvey, writing like a kind of Melville of the skies, finds that fitting surplus again and again."

James Wood, The New Yorker 

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