Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press
NEW!
A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize–winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours
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 a gift—a moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet.
“Beautifully rendered, deeply affecting, thoroughly thoughtful and surprisingly prescient.”—New York Times Book Review
“Harvey is an intelligent and audacious writer, able and willing to take creative risks and perform stylistic feats. . . This is a beautifully written and expertly structured medieval mystery packed with intrigue, drama and shock revelations…We navigate the corners of Harvey’s characters, all the while marveling at the intricacy of her puzzle and the seductiveness of her prose.”―Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Harvey has summoned this remote world with writing of the highest quality, conjuring its pungencies and peculiarities… In this superb novel, time, like guilt, is a murky medium, at once advancing and circling back, and pulling humankind helplessly between its battling currents.”―Wall Street Journal
“The Western Wind brings medieval England back to life… By the time we find out how Tom Newman died, we’re less interested in a mystery solved and more intrigued by the fate of a long-gone place, a place that Harvey brings to life from its historical tomb.”―Washington Post
“To read Harvey is to grow spoiled on gorgeous phrases; she’s an author you want to encounter with pencil in hand.”—New Yorker
“Both cools and warms, lofts and lulls, settling gradually on its inhabitant with an ethereal solidity.”—New York Times Book Review
“So exquisitely written it’s a challenge to review, as there is an impulse to quote nearly every precise, stylized line. Her chronicle of morality, mortality and memory is adept at capturing the ineffable reservations with—and appreciation for—being alive.”—Newsday
“The Shapeless Unease is a masterpiece, so good I can hardly breathe. I’m completely floored by it.”—Helen Macdonald
“The Shapeless Unease captures the essence of fractious emotions—anxiety, fear, grief, rage—in prose so elegant, so luminous, it practically shines from the page. Harvey is a hugely talented writer, and this is a book to relish.”—Sarah Waters
“This book felt enormous to me, mercurial, devastating, seeming to grapple with the nature of everything in a manner so compelling it is impossible not to be swept along. A book to return to again and again.”—Daisy Johnson
An Independent Literary Publisher Since 1917
