Samantha Harvey

A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours. A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space--not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan--have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live. Profound, contemplative and gorgeous, Orbital is a gift--a moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet.

Orbital

A genre-defying debut memoir of insomnia by Betty Trask Prize-winner and one of our most singular stylists, Samantha Harvey.

A Year of Not Sleeping

The Shapeless Unease

15th century Oakham, in Somerset; a tiny village cut off by a big river with no bridge. When a man is swept away by the river in the early hours of Shrove Saturday, an explanation has to be found: accident, suicide or murder? The village priest, John Reve, is privy to many secrets in his role as confessor. But will he be able to unravel what happened to the victim, Thomas Newman, the wealthiest, most capable and industrious man in the village? And what will happen if he can't? Moving back in time towards the moment of Thomas Newman's death, the story is related by Reve - an extraordinary creation, a patient shepherd to his wayward flock, and a man with secrets of his own to keep. Through his eyes, and his indelible voice, Harvey creates a medieval world entirely tangible in its immediacy.

The Western Wind

Dear Thief is a letter to an old friend, a song, a jewel, and a continuously surprising triangular love story. Samantha Harvey writes with a dazzling blend of fury and beauty about the need for human connection and the brutal velnerability that need exposes.

Dear Thief

Six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft contemplating the world below 'Beautiful in every aspect' SARAH MOSS, author of Summerwater A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. 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. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. 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? 'One of the most beautiful novels I have read in a very long time' MARK HADDON, author of The Porpoise 'A slim, profound study of intimate human fears set against epic vistas' GUARDIAN

‘Awe-inspiring’ Max Porter

The wilderness

Shapeless Unease

It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's.

The Wilderness

Vento dell'ovest

It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's.As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they become increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? What went so wrong in his life? There was a cherry tree once, and a yellow dress, but what exactly do they mean? As Jake, assisted by 'poor Eleanor', a childhood friend with whom for some unfathomable reason he seems to be sleeping, fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tries to grasp them, and what until recently seemed solid fact is melting into surreal dreams or nightmarish imaginings. Is there anything he'll be able to salvage from the wreckage? Beauty, perhaps, the memory of love, or nothing at all?From the first sentence to the last, The Wilderness holds us in its grip. This is writing of extraordinary power and beauty.

Leonard is alone and rootless, returning to London after his father's death. He moves in with his distant brother William and his family, hoping to renew their friendship but learning to drop his expectations of brotherhood. William is a former lecturer and activist who now runs informal meetings with ex-students. He is defiantly unworldly and forever questioning. When a young student follows William's arguments to a shocking conclusion, it appears William has already set his own fate in motion. Against a backdrop of tabloid frenzy, Leonard can only watch as William embraces the danger in the only way he knows how, which threatens to consume not only himself, but his entire family.

All is Song

An Orange Prize Finalist A Man Booker Prize Nominee Winner of the 2009 Betty Trask Prize A Guardian First Book Award Nominee Jake is in the tailspin of old age. His wife has passed away, his son is in prison, and now he is about to lose his past to Alzheimer’s. As the disease takes hold of him, Jake’s memories become increasingly unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? Why is his son imprisoned? And why can’t he shake the memory of a yellow dress and one lonely, echoing gunshot? Like Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, The Wilderness holds us in its grip from the first sentence to the last with the sheer beauty of its language and its ruminations on love and loss.

“Sleeplessness gets the Susan Sontag illness-as-metaphor treatment in this pensive, compact, lyrical inquiry into the author’s nighttime demons.” —Kirkus Reviews In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose sleep. She tried everything to appease her wakefulness: from medication to therapy, changes in her diet to changes in her living arrangements. Nothing seemed to help. The Shapeless Unease is Harvey’s darkly funny and deeply intelligent anatomy of her insomnia, an immersive interior monologue of a year without one of the most basic human needs. Original and profound, and narrated with a lucid breathlessness, this is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and the will to survive, from “this generation’s Virginia Woolf” (Telegraph). “Captures the essence of fractious emotions—anxiety, fear, grief, rage—in prose so elegant, so luminous, it practically shines from the page. Harvey is a hugely talented writer, and this is a book to relish.” —Sarah Waters, New York Times–bestselling author “Harvey writes with hypnotic power and poetic precision about—well, about everything: grief, pain, memory, family, the night sky, a lake at sunset, what it means to dream and what it means to suffer and survive . . . The big surprise is that this book about ‘shapeless unease’ is, in the end, a glittering, playful and, yes, joyful celebration of that glorious gift of glorious life.” —Daily Mail “What a spectacularly good book. It is so controlled and yet so wild . . . easily one of the truest and best books I’ve read about what it’s like to be alive now, in this country.” —Max Porter, award-winning author of Lanny

“You were going to work your way into my marriage and you were going to call its new three-way shape holy,” writes the unnamed narrator of Dear Thief. The thief is Nina, or Butterfly, who disappeared eighteen years earlier and who is being summoned by this letter, this bomb, these recollections, revisions, accusations, and confessions. “Sometimes I imagine, out of sheer playfulness, that I am writing this as a kind of defence for having murdered and buried you under the patio.” Dear Thief is a letter to an old friend, a song, a jewel, and a continuously surprising triangular love story. Samantha Harvey writes with a dazzling blend of fury and beauty about the need for human connection and the brutal vulnerability that need exposes. “While I write my spare hand might be doing anything for all you know; it might be driving a pin into your voodoo stomach.” Here is a rare novel that traverses the human heart in original and indelible ways.

A Novel

Winner of the Staunch Book Prize. “A beautifully written and expertly structured medieval mystery packed with intrigue, drama and shock revelations.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune An extraordinary new novel by Samantha Harvey—whose books have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize), and the Guardian First Book Award—The Western Wind is a riveting story of faith, guilt, and the freedom of confession. It’s 1491. In the small village of Oakham, its wealthiest and most industrious resident, Tom Newman, is swept away by the river during the early hours of Shrove Saturday. Was it murder, suicide, or an accident? Narrated from the perspective of local priest John Reve—patient shepherd to his wayward flock—a shadowy portrait of the community comes to light through its residents’ tortured revelations. As some of their darkest secrets are revealed, the intrigue of the unexplained death ripples through the congregation. But will Reve, a man with secrets of his own, discover what happened to Newman? And what will happen if he can’t? Written with timeless eloquence, steeped in the spiritual traditions of the Middle Ages, and brimming with propulsive suspense, The Western Wind finds Samantha Harvey at the pinnacle of her outstanding novelistic power. “Beautifully rendered, deeply affecting, thoroughly thoughtful and surprisingly prescient . . . a story of a community crowded with shadows and secrets.” —The New York Times Book Review “Ms. Harvey has summoned this remote world with writing of the highest quality, conjuring its pungencies and peculiarities.” —The Wall Street Journal “Brings medieval England back to life.” —The Washington Post

Barbara Heller

Das Buch zeichnet das Porträt eines Mannes, der an Alzheimer erkrankt ist. Unter dem Eindruck der Krankheit versucht er, die Geschichte seiner Familie aus Erinnerungen zu rekonstruieren.

Roman

Tage der Verwilderung

The Driftwood Beach by Samantha Harvey released on Apr 23, 1982 is available now for purchase.

Samantha Harvey

About

Books

Join the club