I have talked before on blog posts about my love of the podcast The Rest Is Entertainment with Marina Hyde and Richard Osman. Well, a few weeks ago Richard recommended some short books – and this, Orbital, was one of them. It won the 2024 Booker Prize – and I’m often put off books that have won prizes, a bit like Oscar winning films TBH – but decided to go with Richard’s recommendation. Here’s the blurb:

“A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.
Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.
The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?”

I started reading this just as the astronauts Suni Williams and Barry Wilmore landed back on earth after their extended 9-month stay in space on the International Space Station (ISS) (a PROPER space trip, not a billionaire sending random women into the edges of space for 11 minutes or anything!) and I really felt I got an insight into life as an astronaut from this book in terms of their day to day routine, exercise, food – and the effect of living in space on the human body.

Whilst the book is set over 24 Earth hours, that encompasses 16 circling of the Earth – and you also learn a lot of the back story of each of the astronauts / cosmonauts during the storyline.

It is beautifully written and really thought provoking. It’s incredibly different too (but in a good way, not in a Goldfinch way – I’m still sorry to various friends for that!) – but also, as Mr Osman pointed out, if you recommend people a short book and they don’t like it – you haven’t wasted too much of their time!