Samantha Harvey’s four previous novels have roamed through vastly different settings, but their common subject is her characters’ inner landscape, and the ways in which perceptions are altered by time and memory. Her unconventional plots are shaped less by external incident than by philosophical inquiry into the nature of existence and how we make meaning from a life, often from the perspective of distance or in the shadow of death. Orbital, her fifth novel, takes this idea to its logical conclusion; six astronauts of different nationalities, four men and two women, observe the Earth over the course of a day from the International Space Station, 250 miles above its surface.
In orbit, the astronauts are as untethered from time as they are from gravity; in one 24-hour cycle they will see 16 sunrises and sunsets. “You’re bound to Coordinated Universal Time, ground crews tell them,” but up there, in their “great H of metal hanging above the Earth, space shreds time to pieces”. (There are echoes here of Harvey’s acclaimed debut, The Wilderness, in which Alzheimer’s, rather than space, unmoors her narrator from a commonly agreed notion of time.)
