Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, a love letter to our wounded planet, is the perfect choice for the political moment
“To look at the Earth from space is a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realising for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself. What we do to the Earth we do to ourselves,” the novelist and winner of this year’s Booker prize, Samantha Harvey, said in her acceptance speech last week.
Orbital, the winning novel, gives us the view from space. Set on the International Space Station (ISS), it records one day from the perspectives of six astronauts. One day in space means 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets. Instead of the asteroids and aliens of science-fiction, here is the mundane routine of chores, meals and sleep. The characters’ backstories are glimpsed as briefly as passing stars. The only narrative propulsion is a typhoon threatening the Philippines. Nature replaces human drama as the novel’s focus. It is all about perspective.
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