A hypnotic story of life on the International Space Station

In Samantha Harvey’s last book, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping, she navigated the dizzying world of wakeful nights. But whereas in that instance time was slowed down, the long restless nights stretching out on the page, it’s the opposite in her new novel, Orbital, which tells the story of one day in the life of six astronauts on the International Space Station – “sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea”.

Constant orbit at 17,500mph speeds them vertiginously through space and time, watching as “16 sunrises and 16 sunsets, 16 days and 16 nights” unfold on the earth below. Their job is to monitor and observe, whether it’s the performance of their own bodies, or that of the laboratory mice onboard and the spacecraft, or the Earth itself.

Harvey lavishes the most attention on the latter: that “buffed orb” hanging 250 miles beneath them, “like a hallucination, something made by and of light”. Her descriptive powers are second to none. Take that first “dumbfounding” view of the planet from above: “a hunk of tourmaline, no a cantaloupe, an eye, a lilac orange almond mauve white magenta bruised textured shellac-ed splendour.”

Orbital is very much a work driven by language, so traditionalists be warned: there’s scant plot or action. Word arrives that the mother of one of the astronauts has died; another notices a lump growing on his neck; someone else worries about his friends back on earth, whose village is being hit by a typhoon. Such moments are fleeting, glimpsed briefly from the reader’s own spinning journey through the characters’ minds; tension is neither created nor resolved. Just as, from their unique vantage point, national borders on the Earth seem dissolved – all they see is “just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war” – so the divisions between individuals seem to dissolve as well. These are beings untethered from the relationships, drives and desires that governed their lives on terra firma.

Alas, such an image of peaceful cohesion – of a planet that’s “almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses” – is a far cry from reality. But Harvey’s beautiful and soulful vision distracts us from that truth for the duration of this slim but affecting prose poem of a book.

Orbital is published by Vintage at £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books