Samantha Harvey - Orbital (Jonathan Cape, 2023) ****½

This is a little gem of a book. It's not long, just 135 pages, and describes the lives of six astronauts in the International Space Station. There is no plot. Nothing happens. We just get to know the astronauts, but even what they are doing is less relevant than their perspective from outer space on our earth and our place in the universe. 

I'll just give a few examples, quite randomly on the quality of Harvey's exquisite prose. 

"At some point in their stay in orbit there comes for each of them a powerful desire that sets in - a desire never to leave. A sudden ambushing by happiness. They find it everywhere, this happiness, springing forth from the blandest of places - from the experiment decks, from within the sachets of risotto and chicken cassoulet, from the panels of screens, switches and vents, from the brutally cramped titanium, Kevlar and steel tubes in which they're trapped, from the very floors which are walls and the walls which are ceil­ings and the ceilings which are floors. From the handholds which are footholds which chafe the toes. From the spacesuits, which wait in the airlocks somewhat macabre. Everything that speaks of being in space - which is everything - ambushes them with happi­ness, and it isn't so much that they don't want to go home but that home is an idea that has imploded - grown so big, so distended and full, that it's caved in on itself." (p. 12)

Or one more: 

"Some eighty million miles distant the sun is roaring. It edges now toward its eleven-or-so-year maximum, erupting and flashing, when you look you can see its edges are flayed with violent light and its surface sunspot-bruised. Immense solar flares send proton storms earthwards and in their wake are geomagnetic storms trig­gering light displays three hundred miles high. 

It's a radioactive soup out there and if their shields were to fail they'd be cooked and they know it. But a strange effect happens when the sun is so active, whereby its radiation (comparatively meek and resistible) pushes away cosmic radiation (a veritable bag of spitting snakes) and the soup that they swim in is thereby tem­pered. What their shields don't deflect the earth's magnetic fields do, and the dosimeter in the lab is barely perturbed. The sun's par­ticle clouds billow, flares explode and whip earthward in eight minutes flat, energy pulses, explodes, a great ball of fusion and fury. In the sun's fury they're somewhat and improbably cocooned, as if the sun were a dragon and they, by stupendous fortune, had found themselves in its domain and protection. 

And in that leeside shelter here they are; it's early evening now: Shaun collecting the rubbish bags, Roman cleaning the Russian toilet and Pietro the US, Anton cleaning the air purification sys­tem, Chie wiping and disinfecting, Nell vacuuming the air vents, where she finds a pencil, a bolt and a screwdriver, some hair and some nail clippings." 

 It is poetry, as if every single word has value, neatly arranged next to another word with value, only to convey images and feelings that are even stronger. 

Do you need a plot, a story or suspense to write great prose? Not really, as Samantha Harvey demonstrates here on every single page.