Orbital is a quiet little novel following six astronauts and their thoughts as they live on a spacecraft, hovering above Earth. I must admit that I went in not knowing a huge amount about the book or author, and that was a good way to go in.

First, a warning that this is not a book for those that require plot, pace and action. Almost nothing (and everything) happens in Orbital. Second, I’m here to let you know that there are no speech marks. I’ll let you sit with that. So onto my thoughts! Orbital took my breath away with some truly illuminating and poetic passages. The lilting prose and blended dialogue served to play with time and I’d go as far as to say it played with my mind too. It felt like I was floating in space, which is quite a feat from my squishy sofa. There’s some gorgeous vignettes about life aboard spacecraft, but it’s mostly a book that nudges you to question what it means to be human and how much of our humanity is directly laced to the planet on which we reside. As a big nature lover, I appreciated the thought of experiencing Earth’s beauty from afar and quite liked the use of a typhoon to impress the skies’ eye view of a marker of climate change. My main bugbear is that while all the themes work as brilliant devices, we never get any depth! The book plays with you and spits you out. An interesting one to start 2025 off with, but this one won’t be for every reader.

P.S. I need the damn quotation marks!