Book Club: December 1, 2025, 2-4pm, – Fellows and External Fellows – Zoom only event

December 1, 2025, 2-4 pm – Fellows and External Fellows – Zoom only event

Orbital by Samantha Harvey (2023)

Discussion Leader: Malcolm Woodland

Winner of the 2024 Booker and Hawthornden Prizes, Orbital is called, by its creator, a “space pastoral.” In her rhapsodic imagining of 24 hours as the International Space Station orbits earth (with each of the 16 chapters covers a single 90-minute orbiting), Harvey (who has never been to space) lets us experience the colour-drenched vision of earth outside the windows: “the Ganges silt estuary ….The umber plains and ochre rivers, burgundy valley of a thousand-mile ridge … the faint smudge of rust that is the extraordinary autumn bloom of the Jiuzhaigou Valley and then the Gobi Desert … a painter who sees in … brown bolts of duck-egg mauve lemon and crimson.” On board are four men and two women–six astronauts and cosmonauts from Japan, the USA, the UK, Italy and Russia. We witness both the realistic details of the scientific duties and medical tasks of the crew and their reflections on the meaning of life from their unique physical (and, thus, philosophical) perspective in the vastness of space. We read their meditations on what they see and experience–that spectacular beauty of earth but also the everyday of life in space–from their radical position in a spacecraft that affords them both great distance from their own lives and enforced intimacy with the others on board. One of the Booker judges said that the novel transported her from the many crises on Earth (including existential threats like climate and war) and re-framed those crises, and humanity, in a new relief. (Available in all formats; 224 pages)

The link to register is https://forms.office.com/r/SAKzjVzepx

The deadline to register is the Monday morning the day of the event at 8 am. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.

If you have any questions, please contact the organizer, Mary Jane Ashley at maryjane.ashley@utoronto.ca.