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Book at Bedtime

Orbital is Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime, Monday 8th – Friday 12th January 2024

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001v3jn

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James Wood review in The New Yorker

‘The real point of “Orbital” is the demonstration of how a writer might capture this spectacular strangeness in language adequate to the spectacle. And how she might do so with fitting surplus, in ways that surpass the more orderly permissions of journalism and nonfictional prose. Harvey, writing like a kind of Melville of the skies, finds that fitting surplus again and again. 

But how might it feel to sleep while floating in space, to sleep while dimly aware that a mad earthly floor show of light and darkness is constantly spooling beneath you? Harvey’s prose has an instinct for a kind of exact magic. “Even when you sleep you feel the earth turning,” she writes. “You feel all the days that break through your seven-hour night. You feel all the fizzing stars and the moods of the oceans and the lurch of the light through your skin, and if the earth were to pause for a second on its orbit, you’d wake with a start knowing something was wrong.” Is this how it really feels? I’m persuaded by its imaginative accuracy, in the way that I’m persuaded by the imaginative accuracy of Tolstoy’s descriptions of warfare.

“It is hard to believe,” Nell reflected earlier, about the fact that she was hanging off a spaceship hundreds of miles above the round Earth. Samantha Harvey has written a magnificently strange and utterly original book that makes it just a little easier to believe in that particular miracle. When it comes to belief, isn’t that quite a lot to be getting on with?’

Full review

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The Guardian Best Fiction of 2023

Orbital has been included in Justine Jordan’s Best Fiction of 2023

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Interview on NPR

Talking to Ari Shapiro on NPR’s All Things Considered.

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Start the Week

On Radio 4 with Roberto Trotta, Tim Peake and Kirsty Wark discussing space, stars, eclipses, writing and of course toilets.

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Radio 4 – From Fact to Fiction

The North Remembers. A short story written for Radio 4’s From Fact to Fiction, which takes a news story and makes of it a piece of fiction. This also aired as Drama of the Week.

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New Scientist podcast

Discussing Orbital with Rowan Hooper for the New Scientist’s CultureLab podcast.

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Daunt Books

A chat with Emily Rhodes about Orbital at Daunt Books in Marylebone.

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TLS podcast

In conversation with Alex Clark and Lucy Dallas about Orbital.

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‘Orbital’ launch

With Max Porter at Toppings in Bath on 6th November. It looks like Max and I have fallen out over something and Max is trying to find evidence of my wrongdoing and I’m refusing to engage, but of course the event was pure harmony.