Well, I was hoping (very excited) to read a novel, set in space as the genre mentioned is fiction (which is misleading). However, it doesn't seem like fiction or a novel. There's no plot or story to be honest. There are six astronauts in the space station in the name of characters. And the narrative is an informative commentary from their points of view.

The writing is beautiful. If you find space fascinating (who doesn't?) and okay with non fiction kind of informative narration, go for it. But, if you are looking for a novel or a character driven story, you might feel disappointed.

Thank you for the copy.

This brief novel follows the musings, casual observations, grief and conflict of six astronauts as they complete sixteen orbits around the earth. I requested the book on NetGalley. Thanks to Grove Press for approving my electronic ARC. I can’t resist a space story and I was immediately drawn to Orbital’s title and cover art. A quick skim of the description sealed the deal.

Orbital has no plot to speak of. It is a sketch, or maybe a snapshot of a relatively short period of time in the tight confines of an orbiting space station, moving through an infinite landscape. It’s narration is almost completely internal, from the point of view of the astronauts of widely differing backgrounds. While each character gives the reader a peek behind the curtain of their individual experiences and what those experiences look and feel like against the backdrop of space and the the rest of humanity a distant concept through a space-station viewing porthole, some observations are common to each astronaut.

To a person, the astronauts struggle to both describe and to conceptualize the scope of their personal griefs, hopes, ambitions, and failings in comparison to the tiny blur of humanity as it passes by every few hours in orbit. In vivid vignettes they share a new understanding of the earth as “mother”, death as merely a thin sheet of metal away, and their own insignificance—even as the high-achieving leaders in their field of study.

In the end, the novel leaves the reader with an understanding of an overarching paradox infusing life as a human, illustrated through ego versus insignificance, closeness versus distance, and the mundane versus the astonishing.

This short novel is very much worth your time.

I had to go back and re-read a lot of this book because the prose was so dense and repetitive that I felt like I kept missing things. It’s a third-person point of view that switches perspective so often that it was easy to get lost. There were some beautifully written parts but I spent most of it frustrated and uninterested. The structure was interesting because the plot and prose itself both felt very circular and meditative. There were highs and lows — long sentences and very short ones, a lack of an intensive plot, and a strong centre — that made it feel like a looping, slow roller coaster you can’t escape. The idea of it is compelling, but the execution didn’t land for me. The sense of characterization was strong once everyone is introduced and it felt like everything was meant to be a metaphor for something, however vague. Overall, I struggled with it but I can see how someone else might love it.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5689700343

Thanks to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for an advanced reader copy.

I'm always on the lookout for works that blur the lines between literary and science fiction. Orbital is the first literary work I've found that is focused on today. The international space station is real while the crew is fictional.

I thought it was a fascinating blend of science and philosophy. What I found most fascinating is that even though the astronauts are in space, much of their field of view is of the earth and not the rest of the galaxy. I hadn't clued into that fact previously and while reading, I felt true awe just like when I was a kid learning about space for the first time. I'm looking forward to reading interviews with Harvey about her research, especially since her background is in creative writing and philosophy, not science. It must have required an immense amount of research.

Style wise, it felt like a meditative circular poem that mirrors the unique fast/slow experience of the crew. They slowly swim around the station in low gravity while travelling a discombobulating 17,000 km per hour, fully orbiting the earth every 90 minutes(!) I admired the writing, but as a more visual person, I found the many geographical descriptions of earth quite dense and repetitive. However, I found if I slowed down my reading and took longer than normal breaks between chapters, I could better appreciate Harvey's prose and immerse myself in the experience. I also liked Harvey's brief forays into the work and personal lives of the crew and how she wove our climate crisis short-sightedness into the narrative.

This isn't a literary scifi book I'd recommend to fans of plot driven science fiction. However, I
do recommend it to those in the mood for something languid and meditative, or anyone who likes the idea of learning about science through literature rather than a PBS documentary.

Thanks to NetGalley and the author/publisher for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book is unusual in a lot of ways. It's written in third person omniscient perspective that switches perspective so often, mostly between paragraphs, but sometimes even in the middle of one.

This book also didn't really have much of a plot, it's just about astronauts and cosmonauts in the International Space Station doing their thing, not a lot of things happened to them. And thiss means there wasn't much character development. However it still worked and it was still very much readable.

The reasons for that are the prose and the characters. For the prose, it's really dense but in a beautiful way, not in a frustrating-to-read way. The sentences are crafted with a lot of care and precision, making the readers slow down and appreciate it. That means it doesn't really matter (at least for me) if there's no plot.

As for the characters, even though they didn't go through significant developments, they're still compelling because it felt like we get to know so much about each of them. Why they're there and why they're doing this. And the author managed to make them distinct and memorable even without much space and/or developments.

Overall, it's really good but I don't think it's for everyone, if you're looking for thrilling plot or character developments, you're gonna be disappointed. If you enjoy writers like Becky Chambers, but you want something even more philosophically dense, then this book is for you.

Notable for its language and efforts to encompass. But is this a novel? I found it more a kind of litany, a visualization, an agglomeration, with its heart in the right place. A movie with words? A collection of perceptions on the planet, astronomy, the dubious future of earth? Laudable and admirable in many ways. But also repetitive and centre-less. Others will probably love it. I do admire the author, but not this particular offering.

Orbital is a slender literary meditation on a crew of astronauts orbiting the earth. The very fact that it is not science fiction is itself miraculous and implausible. Humanity is in space. That we are in space is not a story about space—it is a story about Earth.

The writing is gorgeous. The novel—if you can call it that—is essentially an obsessive circling around the view of Earth from space. Hold it in your mind, the book demands, this miraculous planet. There is not much character development, no real conflict, little in the way of plot. Just this obsessive circling, an effort to grasp something intangible in the specifics of space travel. To take the knowledge that humans have left earth and repeat it like a mantra; to embellish it with tiny images, like an illuminated manuscript—do these intricate illuminations say more or less than the words they honor, or do they speak together in one voice? Hold them in your mind.

From this particular image, or infinite sequence of images—the earth from orbit—arises a more general interest in images: meditations on Velázquez’s La Meninas, on photographs of Earth taken from the moon. Does a change in perspective change anything? Or is it just human folly and hubris to think that by changing our view of the Earth we change the planet itself?

Was really expecting a different book about space travel rather than a character driven novel with space travel as an add-on. At least it felt that way. Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC.

There needs to be a new genre created for books like this one, a gorgeously written meditation on Earth and space and humanity. I am in awe of Harvey's talent and absolutely obsessed with understanding how she was able to so vividly describe the astronauts and cosmonauts experiences without having gone up there herself. I feel as though I've been on a journey that I never thought I'd take and genuinely feel as though my perspective shifted and some of my long-held beliefs were affected by this moving and brilliant piece of writing. Is it a novel in the traditional sense of the word? I'm not sure. But it sure was a great read and a visually stunning experience, which is a feat in and of itself, given that it was just words on a page. I don't know how she did it, but I'm sure grateful to have gone on this ride. Can't wait to share this one!

You imagine that orbiting the earth must be something akin to watching the world’s greatest, most expansive documentary unfolding before you (narrated, of course, by Sir David Attenborough because who else would work in this, or any, context?) or appreciating natural artwork so big and overwhelmingly brown, blue and green-tinged beautiful that nothing else can even touch you sensorily.

Or perhaps it’s life’s greatest out-of-body experience, an existential trip far from the humdrum surface where gravity usually holds you tight and close, and where the chance to fly free isn’t not even a possibility, making it’s availability in orbit something of a freeing wonder?

Whatever it feels like, and no doubt it can be everything from wondrously escapist to nauseatingly disruptive, there’s no doubt that the person to capture it is Samantha Harvey.

Her newest novel Orbital takes us on a journey into endless navigations of the earth where six astronauts, on board the international space station have to deal with life writ cosmically large and intimately emotional, their lives both as normal as ever in some respects and brilliantly different in ways that reshape perspective and soul in immeasurably life-changing ways.

The thing that you notice first about this gloriously affecting piece of work is how poetic it feels; every single line feel like a work of lyrical art, with Harvey’s descriptions of the planet passing underneath something of transportive beauty and observational lushness.

In fact, if you are a geography nerd or simply someone who loves pouring over atlases with their mountain ridges and large (though sadly shrinking) swathes of forest green, you will find much to love about the descriptive passages which are everywhere in Orbital and which provide a gloriously alive canvas upon which the author tells her nuanced and emotionally intimate story of six astronauts drawn from across the globe.

These people – Roman, Nell, Shaun, Chie, Pietro and Anton – arrive in two groups but quickly become a family of sorts though Harvey is insightfully quick to point out that while they are forced together by circumstance, they have instinctual barriers to too much closeness which might prove emotionally dangerous in a place where family is far away, physically at least, and where too much self-truth might be too much to handle.

Even musical and other preferences are kept closely guarded secrets for the most part.

What unites them beside their daily chores and exercise regimen and their experimental work on a range of scientific endeavours, istheir shared sense that something remarkable is happening to them.

How can you not feel some shared sense of being and purpose when you’re staring down at the rippling mountains of the Caucuses or you’re watching, and photographing, to advance the boundaries of meteorological science, a super typhoon that is growing and growing in size, sweeping up whole countries and oceans in its remorseless race across the Pacific and Southeast Asia.

What makes Orbital something truly special is the way in which Harvey infuses this expansive wonder with intimacy of experience and thought so that what might appear intimidatingly big becomes accessibly and soul-soothingly small and holdable.

It’s a marvellous balance of the epic and the intimate and Harvey sustains it throughout a novel which finds a thousand ways to say the Earth is beautiful and our lives have meaning without once feeling like it’s repeating itself or being stale in its observances.

The other great gift is taking something very few of us will ever experience and making it feel both extraordinary and ordinary all at once, a tantalising mix of the routine and the unique that reinvigorates any sense we might have that life has run its course in terms of newness and novelness and that we have nothing left to truly discover.

Reading Orbital is to feel like you’re discovering the planet on which you love and the life given to you while you are on it all over again, much like the six astronauts who find themselves granted a whole new way of viewing the Earth and their lives and who are simultaneously changed and confirmed in what they already know about being alive.

Theirs is not an experience unaffected by the travails of life either with one of them grappling with the death of their mother while they are in no position to say any kind of meaningful goodbye while another worries about a friend and his family caught in the path of typhoon they are documenting.

What strikes you about Orbital, quite apart from its luminously beautiful evocations of the planet and humanity’s place upon it, is how much we need our connectedness to others.

Every page is full of each of the astronauts musing on what their loved ones might be doing right now, or thinking back to an email passage from someone they love and knowing that while their lives are wholly different to those of most other people, that it’s those very people that matter to them most.

Yes, they have launched themselves into the atmosphere without hesitation, with one of them happy to send themselves to Mars without thinking about it, and they love what they get to do, but what makes it all worth something, apart from their growing connection with each other as they orbit the earth sixteen times on various trajectories, are the people down below.

They frame and put in emotional context all that beauty and all the terror of weather events out of control and a planet of ridges and oceans and strikingly lit coastlines, and it is those people that make the wholly extraordinary feeling intimately touchingly, welcomingly ordinary.

Orbital is thus a thing of quiet, stunningly enveloping humanity; yes, the experience of orbiting the Earth is without parallel and it can be ignored or dismissed easily, with Harvey’s lucidly beautiful descriptions making that all but impossible anyway, but what anchors it all, what gives it all purpose, meaning and a sense of emotional time and place are the people we are and whom we know, and as the six astronauts race across a globe of endless night and day, that point is driven home in ways that get seared into you and cannot be quickly forgotten or lost.

I had little expectation going in. The premise just sounded interesting. Wow! It’s gorgeously written.

Not much happens in this book. But that’s the point. It’s is a gorgeous ode to otter space. To giving up earthly things to explore unknowns.

Here is an example of one of many passages I highlighted “you could know the earth inside out, in its little hollow of space. You could never really comprehend the starts, but the earth you could know in the way you know another person, in the way he came quite studiedly and determinedly to know his wife. With a yearning that’s hungry and selfish. He wishes to know if, inch by inch.”

This book was admittedly not one of my usual reads. It’s quiet. But it is beautiful and I have no doubt will impact many readers.

This is a beautifully written, incredibly interesting book about life on the international space station, but I would struggle to call it a novel. The characters are sketchily drawn and their interactions are few. A key fictional aspect of the plot, a new moon landing, seems to have little purpose in the story. As an essay about space, the earth's plight and a human quest for knowledge it is outstanding. As a novel, three stars is generous. Sorry! Would love to read a really gripping literary novel set in space. In the meantime, this book is essential reading for anyone wanting to know more about life in orbit.

This thoughtful novel, in which six astronauts circle the Earth, leans more heavily toward existential musings and visually descriptive prose than plot, and I think that some readers will find this quite rewarding. The writing felt lyrical, almost fluid. At times I felt swept up in this style, like I was bobbing peacefully, almost meditatively, along on a sea of words. Eventually, though, my attention started to drift. I actually think it would have been interesting and immersive to have had a globe nearby during the visual descriptions of the planet. My focus was regularly drawn back in by profound passages about humanity, and I highlighted quite a few lovely excerpts that I am sure I will revisit and share with friends once this book is released in December. Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for providing a Digital Review Copy of Orbital.

Excellent little gem that will get some readers thinking. This was engaging and unexpected, and tough not to judge it's beautiful cover.

Thanks very much for the free copy for review!

I love space and books about space, which is why I was initially drawn to this book and its premise (also the cover, I mean look at it!). A day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts in orbit around the Earth? Sign me up! I'm fascinated by the International Space Station, and it's not a topic I've come across in fiction before.

This novella is not for everyone, but I was not disappointed. The writing meanders dreamily, almost lyrically, through the 16 orbits the station does around the Earth, and we get glimpses into the lives of the people there, their feelings, their connections to home and to each other, and most of all, to humanity and our place in the universe. It's my favourite theme to explore in science fiction, and I do love that hopeful feeling of renewed faith in mankind and our constant search for meaning.

I found certain passages beautiful, others a bit redundant, but all in all, I very much enjoyed my time reading this, and I would recommend it to any space lover out there.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

I have never read a novel like Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital “ and I mean that in the very best sense. I found this book to be absolutely mesmerizing from the get-go, just as stunning as the galactic views from the space station on which it occurs. It’s not just that it’s remarkably and exactingly well-researched, although I certainly stand in awe of that and how seamlessly Ms. Harvey weaves those factoids into her work. To me, what is so outstanding and impressive about this novel is the way Ms. Harvey is able to permeate and inhabit the mindset and consciousness of the astronauts on board — she doesn’t portray them, she inhabits them. She immerses us in the unique local and global societal dynamics of an International space mission six months in, writing with such insightfulness and clarity, that as crazy as this sounds, I googled her to see whether she was, in fact, a former astronaut. Her imagination and creativity, beyond her obvious writing talent, is just staggering. It’s the kind of writing that provokes the word “genius “as a descriptive, and while that word may be too often and too loosely used, here it fits. In short, this book is profound, introspective and exquisitely, beautifully wrought. My deepest thanks to Grove Atlantic Inc. and to Net Galley for sharing this gem with me as an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

the author’s words felt like a watercolour painting, it just flowed very seamlessly this book was more like a poem with how beautifully written it was
space travel is an adventure in and of itself but this author somehow makes it look more extraordinary than it already is, felt very magical
i really enjoyed that it was a very emotional book on a subject that it’s often in an action/adventure genre, i resonated with the characters’ feelings and i connected to the story.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for giving me an advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review.

Written in third person perspective, this story is about 6 astronauts as they orbit the Earth. The book explores humanity’s connection to the Earth and the astronauts' pasts.

The book never quite hooked me. The beginning is slow paced and a little confusing. The book also lacks quotation marks which makes following dialogue difficult. However, I did find the information about the effects of being in space and of the age of space exploration interesting. The novel doesn’t seem to have a solid structure, instead it floats around like a turtle in space. I think that for a novel like this it would have been better for it to be character driven. It feels like the novel was trying too hard to be cerebral and contemplative. I also found the use of similes to be a little much at times.

The characters felt empty. I wasn’t able to relate to any of the characters or to understand them. The dialogue is clunky and curt. The thoughts of the characters felt like they were being told by the narrator rather than shown by the character. That being said I can also say that I did not dislike any of the characters. I feel like I didn’t learn enough about them to care for their feelings or interactions. The characters felt like they were only plot devices used to ask questions that are meant to be thought provoking. The characters were little more than puppets on a string made to dance like dolphins at an aquarium balancing a ball on their nose for our amusement.

I feel that the novel could have used some more world building. I found the mission unclear and not explained enough. It would have been nice to at least see a flashback of the planning for the final mission and how they chose the astronauts they did. The world felt empty like a void, an empty place, a black hole with no light peering in.

The writing style just didn’t connect with me. I found it way too poetic and flowery. The way it was written is difficult to follow along with. The writing style is like a superfluously talkative mongoose who has a bad back and ate too many frogs. Why am I using so many similes you may ask? Well you should ask the author that too because this is just a mere taste of the similes you will find in this novel.

My final thoughts on this book are that I did not enjoy reading it. While it dealt with interesting themes, the way the author handled them was disappointing. The ending was also disappointing with not much else then some flowery language. If you enjoy a slower paced novel that is contemplative and poetic in nature and is question driven then you might enjoy this book.

did not finish this book....I will not be giving feedback on this title....................
did not finish this book....I will not be giving feedback on this title....................

This was a short novel with a thought-provoking premise, and it read to me as a strange cross between sci-fi and literary fiction. The story about six astronauts on the International Space Station, possibly the last astronauts to ever be there (as moon missions are once again possible in this universe) was quite different from what I usually read, and I'm not sure I've ever read anything quite like it before. I am usually drawn to more plot-driven novels, and such a thing might have helped with my enjoyment of this book somewhat, as the storyline involves less plot and more introspection and philosophizing which sometimes muddled my mind a bit.

However, this does not mean I thought it was a bad book. Despite my previous points, I know that this book was not meant to be a plot-driven story. The author was using these astronauts and their lives on the ISS as jumping-off points to explore and reflect on the human condition and what exactly further space exploration will mean for us as a species. This novel ultimately accomplishes what it set out to do in a fairly decent fashion.