Orbital is a book of perspective.

It's the kind of thing most of us need a reminder about, wrapped up in the minutiae of our lives - the traffic, the bills - and believing we mean something against the vastness of the universe and the very beautiful planet we are all on.

On an orbiting space station, a team of astronauts look toward their home - mother - and contemplate it's beauty. Harvey's prose renders it beautiful for the reader, too. Moscow, Vladivostok, London blink at the stars, the boats off the coast of Malaysia, the northern aurora.

Beneath them the South Pacific now passes in absolute night, an endless pit of black, and there is no planet, just the gentle green line of the atmosphere and numberless stars, astonishing solitude, everything so near and infinite.

The individuals on the space station muse on the beauty of their home planet, in love with their job but also with hearts beating inextricably in time with the beat of the Earth below.

Its beauty ... ringing singing lightness. It's not peripheral and it's not centre; it's not everything and it's not nothing, but it seems touch more than something. It's made of rock but appears from here a gleam and ether, a nimble planet that moves three ways-in rot tion on its axis, at a tilt on its axis, and around the sun. This planer that's been relegated out of the centre and into the sidelines-the thing that goes around rather than is gone around, except for by its knobble of moon. This thing that harbours us humans who polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are. And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it's of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of man- kind's ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.

The writer moves from the memories of the astronauts of home, their childhood, training and personal reflections to day my to day life on the spaceship and then bigger musings about the earth and humanity. It's ultimately an uplifting book.

I've had this one on a borrow list for months now at the library. It's only thin - at 136 pages, it wasn't worth buying, although I will borrow it again to read at a more leisurable pace. I have to return it by Christmas because I won't be able to in Tassie, and it's on a seven day loan as it's this years Booker prize winner. I'm half way through and I'm in love with it.

There's no real plot, which is unusual, but it's captivating nonetheless. It's a song to humanity, and our place in the universe.

Highly recommended.

With Love,

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