Tag: book club

Book Review – Orbital by Samantha Harvey

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About the Book

Six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft above the earth. They are there to collect meteorological data and conduct scientific experiments. But mostly they observe. Together they watch our silent blue planet: endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams.

So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

Format: Paperback (135 pages) Publisher: Vintage
Publication date: 5th December 2023 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

‘A hand-span away beyond a skin of metal the universe unfolds in simple eternities.’

This is just one of the stunning sentences that feature in the small but perfectly formed Orbital. Viewed by the astronauts as they orbit the planet, Earth is ‘an unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright’. In the course of one day they see daybreak and nightfall as they travel over continents. The fragility of the Earth is brought home as they track the progress of a huge typhoon, able only to measure its movement and observe – later – the damage it has wrought while they slept.

But their existence is fragile too, reliant on the protection of the spacecraft, the remote monitoring of their vital signs, and on each other.

I loved the frequent juxtapositions the author creates. For example, that the astronauts must be at peak fitness in order to undertake the mission yet they will return to Earth less healthy as a result of their time in space. ‘These hearts, so inflated with ecstasy at the spectacle of space, are at the same time withered by it.’ They look down on a living planet but from a place where they could not survive without the spacecraft, and only then if it remains intact. Seen from space the Earth has no visible borders yet they know below there is conflict over those very same borders. And although the astronauts come from a range of countries, the spacecraft is not quite a ‘nationless, borderless outpost’. As mandated by their government, the Russians use a separate toilet and shabbier sleeping quarters.

Thanks to the author’s in-depth research, there is fascinating detail about life aboard the space station, including the practical difficulties of moving around, eating and carrying out everyday activities. And the sort of chores you encounter on Earth still need to be carried out: emptying the rubbish, cleaning toilets.

If there is a weakness in the book, it’s character development. Of the six it was only Chie, the Japanese astronaut, I felt I got to know really well. She feels most keenly the vast distance between herself and Earth when she learns of the death of her mother, sad that she will be unable to carry out the traditional rituals. She calms herself by making lists of ‘anticipated things’, things she will be able to experience or do once back on Earth, such as slamming a door in anger. Tasked with carrying out scientific experiments on mice that require precision and a degree of detachment, she neverthless feels a tenderness towards them as they, like her, struggle to adapt to zero gravity.

There is one particularly striking chapter – ‘Orbit 13’ – that captures the infinitesimally small period of human existence in the ‘cosmic calendar of the universe of life’. Taking the starting point of the Big Bang as 1st January, humans – ‘the most opportunistic and crafty [life]form’ – don’t appear until mid-afternoon on 31st December. And it’s only in the closing second of the year that a vast array of things appear: inventions, scientific discoveries, artistic and philosphical concepts, the birth of famous individuals. The author delivers this in a wonderfully eclectic list that includes everything from teabags, the sprung mattress, W.B. Yeats and the split atom to crowdfunding.

The book has a strong ecological message about the damage being wrought on the Earth by human activity. And not just on the planet either because spacecraft must today navigate through the junkyard of debris that lies in low-Earth orbit. We litter wherever we go, seemingly.

Orbital is one of those books that leaves you with something to ponder on every page, every paragraph even. I can understand why the judges saw fit to award it the Booker Prize.

In three words: Lyrical, thought-provoking, immersive
Try something similar: In This Ravishing World by Nina Schuyler

About the Author

Author Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels, The Wilderness, All Is Song, Dear Thief, The Western Wind and Orbital. She is also the author of a memoir, The Shapeless Unease. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, the Walter Scott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Baileys Prize, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and the HWA Gold Crown Award. The Western Wind won the 2019 Staunch Book Prize, and The Wilderness was the winner of the AMI Literature Award and the Betty Trask Prize.

Orbital, was published in November 2023 by Jonathan Cape (UK) and Grove Atlantic (US). It was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction 2024. It is currently on the long list for the Climate Fiction Prize. It is the winner of The InWords Literary Award 2024, the 2024 Hawthornden Prize for Literature and the 2024 Booker Prize.

Samantha lives in Bath, UK, and is a Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.(Photo: Goodreads author page)

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Book Review – Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown by Rory Carroll

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About the Book

Book cover of Killing Thatcher by Rory Carroll

Killing Thatcher is the gripping account of how the IRA came astonishingly close to killing Margaret Thatcher and to wiping out the British Cabinet – the most daring conspiracy against the Crown since the Gunpowder Plot.

In this compelling story about a history-changing moment of violence, Rory Carroll documents the decades-long fight for Irish freedom, the shocking assassination of Lord Mounbatten, Thatcher’s dismissal of a hunger strike by republican prisoners, and the hide-and-seek drama between the IRA and the security services.

Format: Paperback (416 pages) Publisher: Mudlark
Publication date: 28th March 2024 Genre: Nonfiction, History

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My Review

Whether you know very little or a lot about the history of the turbulent and often violent relationship between Ireland and England over the centuries, I think you will appreciate the lucid way the author explains a very complicated issue. As you’d expect from a journalist, he adopts a distinctly non-partisan approach, relying on a range of sources including interviews with participants on both sides. (Notably, the one person who refused to speak to him was Gerry Adams.)

I’m of an age where I can remember the period when IRA activity on the mainland of Britain was at its height but I had forgotten just how intense and all-pervading it was, or just how many casualties and fatalities it caused. These included police, members of the rescue services, bystanders and those whose job was to try to defuse the bombs.

I recall watching the coverage of people being rescued from The Grand Hotel in Brighton after the bombing on 12th October 1984, the penultimate day of the Conservative Party Conference. The photograph of Cabinet Minister Norman Tebbit being brought out of the debris which is included in the book, is a reminder of the destruction the bomb caused, some by falling masonry. Although Tebbit’s injuries were serious they were not as life-changing as those of his wife. There were five fatalities but not, through chance, Margaret Thatcher. Some may find her determination to carry on with the conference hard-hearted, others may think it a sign of defiance.

The description of Killing Thatcher as ‘the ultimate political thriller…the perfect blend of true crime and political history – propelled by a countdown to detonation’ is pretty much on the money. The most thrilling section – perhaps appropriately enough in Chapter 13 – is that depicting events in the hours and minutes before the bomb’s detonation. Who was doing what, where and with whom in the hotel as the minutes ticked by. And, in another part of the world, Patrick Magee, the man who placed the bomb on a long-delay timer, listening to the radio eager to find out if the device had detonated.

Another striking section of the book is that describing the 1981 hunger strikes by IRA prisoners in the Maze prison (also referred to as H-Block). Bobby Sands is probably the most well-known of the men (ten in all) who starved themselves to death as part of a campaign to be given the status of prisoners of war rather than criminals. The author describes how the hunger strikes became effectively a stand-off between the prisoners and Margaret Thatcher, and he doesn’t pull any punches when describing what starving yourself to death means in reality.

There was lots in the book I didn’t know (or had forgotten) such as the extent of the fundraising for the IRA in the United States and the involvement of Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi in providing weapons.

The hunt for the bomber that forms the final section of the book is full of fascinating information about fingerprints and other forensic techniques. It has the tension and detail of a police procedural. The investigation team were literally looking for a needle in a haystack and lacked many of the tools that are a commonplace part of detective work today. This was the days of paper records, manual cross-checking and only limited access to computers. The patient surveillence that eventually tracks down Magee and his associates has many of the hallmarks of an espionage thriller.

This was a book club pick and being focused on the assassination attempt of such a polarising figure as Margaret Thatcher made it difficult at times not to get drawn into a debate about her political views rather than the merits of the book. However, everyone thought it a very well-researched and readable account of the history of the conflict between Irish republicans and the British government.

In three words: Fascinating, comprehensive, authoritative
Try something similar: The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth (fiction) or (nonfiction) Case Closed:Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK by Gerald Posner

About the Author

Author Rory Carroll

Rory Carroll, currently the Guardian‘s Ireland correspondent, was a 12-year-old living in Dublin at the time of the Brighton bombing and remembers the scenes in its aftermath. He has had a long and highly successful career as a foreign correspondent reporting from Belfast in the 1990s, London, Baghdad after the American-led invasion of Iraq, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Los Angeles. His first book, Comandante: Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, was published in 2013. In 2018 Rory returned to Dublin and found himself spellbound by the memoirs, biographies, police reports, court records, testimonies and eyewitness accounts of a story that he had assumed was familiar but was anything but. Killing Thatcher is born from that fascination.

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