Book 9: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

A book club book! And one that read with some trepidation, because I don't always vibe with a short novel that's more about mood and language than it is about plot, and I am more lukewarm on stories set in space than others. 

However! I really, really loved this book. The prose is certainly stylized, but I think the structure and format of the novel (24 hours on a space station that's rotating around Earth 16 times in that timeframe) made it all work for me. There are six astronauts up there, from a variety of backgrounds - two from Russia and then one each from Italy, the UK, the U.S. and Japan - and the book tells the story of what they go through on a typical day up there, and what they see of the world below. It's not a lot of plot, but it isn't just descriptions of the glory and wonder of the planet below, and even that stuff made me so happy. I just had a great time reading this book, and in the end that's worth a lot!

Grade: A