Deep Wheel Orcadia
Harry Josephine Giles (Picador)
Winner of the 2022 Arthur C Clarke award, this is a remarkable feat of language and imagination: a verse novel written in Orcadian Scots, with a lively and inventive southern English translation running along the bottom of the pages. If that sounds forbidding or abstruse, it shouldn’t: Deep Wheel Orcadia is a rattling read. Two characters arrive at the titular deep-space station: Astrid, returning from Mars to her childhood home; and Darling, who is on the run. They join “the thraan mixter-maxter o fock”, a “tossedawkward mix of people” who work the station, mining a strange substance called Light from a nearby gas giant. The small wheel-world is cognate with Giles’s native Orkney in relation to the mainland, and the book details their hard work and hard play: drink and dancing, love and belonging. There is marvellous language on every page, and if the plot is a little pat, the whole makes for an unforgettable engrossment in community and estrangement.
