Bookclub News February 2025

Dear Readers, Samantha Harvey's "Orbital" is an account of a day in the life of six astronauts of different nationalities, four men and two women, in the International Space Station as it completes 16 orbits of the Earth. There is no plot to speak of, and we learn little of their individual personalities and backgrounds. The mundanity of their tasks and routines in their contained micro world contrasts with the awesomeness of the real world visible through their windows and the extraordinary beauty of the constantly changing Earth viewed from space, where national boundaries have no significance and wars are invisible.

Samantha Harvey has said that her objective was to write "a kind of space pastoral", a meditation on our precious planet, and that the six humans are simply "part of the image, not the lens". The book (novel?) combines luminous descriptions with impressive research, and we thought she just about succeeded, even if was difficult to sustain the repetitive narrative over the length of the book. On balance, the quality of the writing won most of us over, and we rated it as 6, Recommended.

Our book for March is Zadie Smith's "The Fraud". One of the most avidly followed court cases in English legal history is set against the highly entertaining domestic arrangements of a not so great author and his family. Our meeting will be on Thursday 27 March.

Enjoy your reading,

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