There’s an old quote by somebody about how it’s too bad we’ve never sent a poet to space. I think this book is pretty close to what would come back if we did. It a slim book with lots of lamenting about earth and space, beauty, loneliness, family, time, and more. It’s incredibly well written. My only complaint is that it gets a little self indulgent towards the end, but the length of the book keeps it from becoming tiring. I really enjoyed it. ( )

I can see why this won the Book Prize. More of a long vignette than a plot-driven novel, this is a work of profound poetic eloquence. A meditation on what it means to be a human in orbit around home. The lyricism is breathtaking. ( )

My first review of 2025 is of the Booker Prize winner of 2024.

Six astronauts, four men and two women, are aboard a space station. Roman and Anton are from Russia, Chie is Japanese, Nell is from the U.K., Pietro is Italian, and Shaun is American. We experience a day in their lives during which they complete sixteen orbits of Earth. The reader learns about their scientific studies and about the difficulties of life in a cramped space station and the stresses of prolonged weightlessness.

But this is a novel with little plot. We do learn a bit about the lives and interests of the crew and some events occurring on Earth, but the focus is on the astronauts’ thoughts and reactions to looking at their home planet. They are always captivated and astonished by Earth, so the book is really a meditation about the beauty and vulnerability of our planet.

As the space station orbits various parts of Earth, there are dazzling descriptions of its splendour. Africa, for instance, “is the paint-splattered, ink-leached, crumpled-satin, crumbled-pastel overflowing-fruit-bowl continent of chaotic perfection, the continent of salt pans and red sedimented floodplain and the nerve networks of splaying rivers and mountains that bubble up from the plains green and velvety like mould growth.” One orbit gives views of French Polynesia, “the islands like cell samples, the atolls opal lozenges . . . the arc of smoking volcanoes on the Caribbean Plate. It’s Uzbekistan in an expanse of ochre and brown, the snowy mountainous beauty of Kyrgyzstan. The clean and brilliant Indian Ocean of blues untold. The apricot desert of Takla Makan traced about with the faint confluencing and parting lines of creek beds.”

What is also emphasized is how the planet has been “shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything.” The damage humans have done is described: “Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic . . . Every retreating or retreated or disintegrating glacier, every granite boulder of every mountain laid newly bare by snow that has never before melted, every scorched and blazing forest or bush, every shrinking ice sheet, every burning oil spill, the discolouration of a Mexican reservoir which signals the invasion of water hyacinths feeding on untreated sewage, a distorted flood-bulged river . . . or the prolonged pinking of evaporated lakes, or the Gran Chaco’s brown seepage of cattle ranch where once was rainforest, the green-blue geometries of evaporation pools where lithium is mined from the brine, or Tunisian salt flats in cloisonné pink, or the altered contour of a coastline where sea is reclaimed . . . or a vanishing mangrove forest in Mumbai, or the hundreds of acres of greenhouses which make the entire southern tip of Spain reflective in the sun.”

Of course, on the space station boundaries between countries are not visible: “a sense of friendliness and peace prevails, since even at night there’s only one man-made border in the whole of the world . . . That’s all civilisation has to show for its divisions, and by day even that has gone.” For the astronauts, the station is a “nationless, borderless outpost” where they “drink each other’s recycled urine . . . [and] breathe each other’s recycled air.” The message for humans is clear.

Humans tend to think of themselves and their planet as exceptional, but “in fact it’s a planet of normalish size and normalish mass rotating about an average star in a solar system of average everything in a galaxy of innumerable many, and that the whole thing is going to explode or collapse.” The earth is not everything but “it’s not nothing” either. Likewise, our lives are “inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once. . . . We matter greatly and not at all. . . . your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which is nothing, and also much more than everything.”

Regardless, Earth is worth preserving. The astronauts think, “maybe all of us born to [Earth] have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.”

Though the book is short, really more of a novella, it should, I think, be read in snippets rather than as a whole. Pick it up, read a chapter, and put it down. The lyrical language should be savoured and the ideas deserve thought. It takes time to ponder whether progress is beautiful: each rocket has boosters which “at lift-off burn the fuel of a million cars” and human ventures in space have resulted in “Two hundred million things orbiting at twenty-five thousand miles an hour and sandblasting the veneer of space.”

Reading the book is a good way of beginning a new year. It reminds us of the beauty that surrounds us and, though humbling in some ways, also offers hope.

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) or substack (https://doreenyakabuski.substack.com/) to see over 1,100 of my book reviews. ( )

Read for a literary fiction book club.
This details the story of 4 men and 2 women who are orbiting the earth on the International Space Station. Each one has a reason for wanting to be an astronaut / cosmonaut. They marvel at their experience, at the beauty of the earth as a planet, at the wonders of the universe.
They are watching with anticipation and trepidation as a rocket launch heads to the moon for the first time in over 5o years.
This is a lovely book which highlights how small we are in relation to the universe and how it is our job to protect our Earth. ( )

Four astronauts and two cosmonauts on the international space station make 16 orbits of the planet over the course of 24 hours. Moving deftly from one space traveller to the next, Samantha Harvey shares their thoughts and memories and to some extent their hopes as the earth flashes past moving from day to night over and over again. The constraint of the formal construction perhaps liberates the imagination. So what might be tedious information dumps of space data instead become poetic and philosophical forays into the very question of existence. But a kind of gravity, the very mundanity of existence, the eating, working, sleeping bits of existence prevent the prose from dissipating into the ether. It’s a remarkable achievement.

Certainly recommended. ( )