Best of the Best Book Club: “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey

The Coronado Public Library’s Best of the Best Book Club meets regularly on the fourth Wednesday of each month to discuss books that have won major awards.

For our October meeting, we will read and discuss the winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, Orbital by Samatha Harvey, an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours.

About Orbital

A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. 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 17,000 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.

Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.