Winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Samantha Harvey is one of only five (5) women who have won this prize. This book will not be for everyone because there isn’t really a plot. However, it is now in the top 10 best books I have ever read. There is just a magical description of earth and of human feeling described by 6 astronauts out in space looking down on our world.
Why would you do this? Trying to live where you can never thrive? Trying to go where the universe doesn’t want you when there’s a perfectly good earth just there that does. He’s never sure if man’s lust for space is curiosity or ingratitude. If this weird hot longing makes him a hero or an idiot. Undoubtedly something just short of either.
The book takes place over 24 Earth hours but because in space the astronauts see 16 sunrises and sunsets it covers each rising and setting of the sun. The amount of work Harvey must have put into this book is major. The book is filled with descriptions of what part of earth the astronauts are looking at; the colors they see; how they eat and sleep and go about their day; and their internal thoughts about humanity.
Here he is now, a non-robot with a camera and a pair of twenty-twenty eyes and a heart pitching forwards, tripping up, at the earth’s singularity. It bangs against his ribs as he films.
There is a map at the beginning that I suggest looking at every time a new chapter begins just to orient yourself to what part of the world she is referring to. There is not much more to say except if you decide to read it to go with an open mind and remember that this book is probably different from what you are used to.
Everybody watching, everybody —. Nell falters as if she’s arrived at a precipice. When I was a child that thought stopped me sleeping, she says. The thought of how quickly everything can turn around. And my father, he just let me get on with it. Candles keep demons away, is what he once said, in a bid to comfort me – that’s why you light them when you remember someone, to keep the demons from them. My father rarely said absurd things, but that was absurd. What use was protection from demons when you’d been in a space shuttle that had broken into five thousand pieces, when your compartment has fallen twelve miles at hundreds of miles an hour and smashed apart in the ocean? If there’d been demons, hadn’t they already acted?
Happy Reading!
Book It Babe 