"Orbital" by Samantha Harvey

Technically correct and poetically beautiful, Orbital sings a song of love for the lone, madly spinning planet we call home. Roughly 90% through her novel, Samantha Harvey writes:

“Before they came here [the six astronauts on the International Space Station] there used to be a sense of the other side of the world, a far-away-and-out-of-reach. Now they see how the continents run into each other like overgrown gardens — that Asia and Australasia are not separate at all but are made continuous by the islands that trail between; likewise Russia and Alaska are nose to nose, barely a spit of water to hold them apart. Europe runs into Asia with not a note of fanfare. Continents and countries come one after the other and the earth feels — not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses. It holds no possibility of opposition.”

“An epic poem of flowing verses” — this phrase exactly describes Orbital. Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, Harvey’s lovely extended piece of creative perspective on the Earth does indeed flow with uninterrupted beauty. In her slender novel the author manages to take up cosmic issues, issues which her intrepid astronauts deal with, discuss, reflect upon, and absorb during the endless orbits (16 every 24 hours!). She freights her characters with personal issues as well; she doesn’t overdo this, it’s not her focus. But she does do it enough to keep her cast relatably human. No, her focus is Earth, endlessly spinning 250 miles below their hurtling craft. Breathtaking descriptions of multiple dawns and sunsets (eight of each every 24 hours) appeal to our logical minds and stir our imaginations. And Harvey helpfully includes a Mercator projection map of the world and inscribes the paths of each orbit for those of us who like to follow along.

Never have physics or astronautics received such poetical treatment. There are fleeting views of the Milky Way during the brief dark periods, but Harvey confines her close observations for the Home Planet. She composes lovely etudes, imbuing them with love and wonder, and renders them in gorgeous poetry. A highly deserving Booker winner, this is not a book to miss! 

 

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"No Man's Land" by Simon Tolkien

 

Simon Tolkien’s protagonist Adam Raine matures from a boy in turn of the 20th Century London to a soldier in the Somme in the Great War, and along the way occupies a long and inescapable series of no man’s lands unique to himself. And of course the No Man’s Land to end all No Man’s Lands occupies the focus and wields its heavy influence on the rest of the narrative, as it did in England and its combatants at the time. This book covers this murderous crucible, this stupendous stupidity, extremely well, charting its influence on a wide variety of characters. The author deals with it in a way that is comprehensive, wise, and gratifying.

A spooked horse tramples Adam’s mother to death on a London street early on, and disconsolate father and son move to the north of England, to a coal mining town. There Adam’s father Daniel hopes to lead the miners to better wages and working conditions, much as he helped labor unions in London. When they first arrive in the north, in a town call Scarsdale, Adam is a lad going on 15 years of age, and occupies a no man’s land — instead of working in the mine, he continues his education at his father’s insistence, and shows enough promise that he could attend university eventually. It separates him from the other boys his age, and marks him forever as a coaldust-free outsider. 

Tolkien lets the drama build as Europe heads toward its collective lunacy. After Adam enlists, he’s eventually made a lance corporal because of his reliability and leadership skills. Again, he’s separate from the men, many of whom he knew from Scarsdale. The novel flows inexorably toward the Somme and gains gravitas and Adam suffers alienation as the war narrative goes forward. The author handles this superbly, and when Adam is sent home from France for a week’s leave, he cannot shake loose from his wartime experiences long enough to even communicate with Miriam, the woman he loves and who loves him. I honor Tolkien’s very realistic handling of Adam’s haunted self.

And the author handles all of his weighty issues with the same grace and maturity. Pick up No Man’s Land and give yourself over to a fine, gratifying story of a hero who lifts himself up in spite of his fears and flaws, and an author who set himself an immense task and fulfilled every expectation a reader could possibly hope for.

 

 

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"Ragnarok" by A.S. Byatt

Author A.S. Byatt presents her novella-length treatment of Norse mythology in a light-touch narrative showing how it captures a young girl’s imagination in wartime England and has apparently stayed with her for the rest of her life. Byatt appends a short general treatment of her views on mythology, and a couple of illustrations for good measure. I’m no one to trust on this matter, but the main mythological plot and dramatis personae themselves seem exhaustive. It is certainly enough to turn my head, and to force me to reread certain sections to try to make sure I’d kept all the dozens of characters — be they gods, monsters, magic plants, or angry wolves — straight and accounted for. 

Overall it’s a highly diverting treatment, and it benefits from the author’s scheme for presenting it as the young girl experiences it. Byatt departs from other retellings of other myths by modern authors, too: she chooses not to novelize her characters in the sense that she does not give them recognizable doubts, personalities, or psychologies. They are vain, vindictive, murderous, ambitious, or dishonest, but never self-doubting. As the author says in her afterword, “No, the wolf swallowed the king of the gods, the snake poisoned Thor, everything was burned in a red light and drowned in blackness.”

So for me, the most interesting aspect of Ragnarok was its effect on the young English girl who loves the myths so much. Compared to it, in the child’s mind Christian teaching pales to watery weakness. At the end, there is a very spare narrative of the thin little girl’s family — her handsome, intrepid father surprises her by returning from the war to a warm welcome, but post-war her mother fades into depression: the long-awaited return to the cottage from which they’d been evacuated “took the life out of the thin child’s mother,” as she sank into the quotidian routine. For the mother,  “Dailiness defeated her.”

Ragnarok contains the vivid flights of a young girl’s fancy within a poignant — and pointed — framework. It’s learned, aesthetically refined, and in its way, comprehensive. I found it well worth the (less than onerous) effort. Take and enjoy!

 

 
 

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"The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls" by Anissa Gray

 

Anissa Gray presents us with the dire predicament and splintered nature of the Cochran family in The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls. The girls of the title,  the sisters and daughters of newly incarcerated Althea, each suffer from distinct and realistic challenges, from eating disorders to obsessive/compulsive behavior to substance abuse. Their progress and setbacks depend on cohesion and support from within their group, but it must come from members who doubt their own ability to provide it. Recounting how these desperate young people cope with personal travails makes for rewarding, vivid reading.

Long-simmering difficulties reach crisis when the state of Michigan finds Althea, the matriarchal figure of two sisters and two daughters, guilty of fraud, and sentences her to five years in prison. The narrative consists of the flurry of guilt, anger, fear, and psychic trauma suffered by the women in the wake of this verdict. We meet several of Althea’s fellow inmates and hear their bitter, sometimes inspired, reaction to their terrible lives. But the book mainly contains the insights and troubled memories of the three adult sisters as they try (without much confidence) to pick up and move on from Althea’s misdeeds. It’s told in a rotating first-person point of view of Althea and her two sisters.

Ravenously Hungry Girls contains heart-rending closeups of each sister’s struggle with her debilitating experiences and the irresistible force of their fears and compulsions. Gray doesn’t sugarcoat any of these issues, nor does she play them for sympathy. No, she paints her characters honestly, warts and all, and shares their failings and their dogged good intentions. 

Through it all, the author reminds her readers of the institutional and cultural handicaps under which these women live. Their race presents its own disadvantages, and the men in their lives are quite far from perfect. Yet the writing hews to the unvarnished, unidealized truth, and she lets her readers judge the rightness of the characters and the narrative for themselves. For me, this novel hits the nail on the head, and shows its author to be a teller of a memorable story, with power, color, and unblinking honesty.

 

 

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"All That Is" by James Salter

 

Author James Salter brought out All That Is in 2013 and in it he traces protagonist Philip Bowman’s relationship history. Bowman pursues and is pursued by a series of beautiful, alluring women from his youth and into his late middle age. In the period between World War II, in which Bowman serves in the U.S. Navy, through and past the wrenching end of the Vietnam War, Salter’s presentation of his hero’s parade of fidelity and infidelity is by turns emotionally engaging and shocking, but unfailingly vivid.

We meet Phil Bowman as a very young but well-respected officer on a ship in the Pacific, as the Allies prepare to invade Okinawa. He comes home with a new and deeper perspective, having lived through the carnage and destruction at sea. He enters the highly competitive publishing field in New York and soon proves a valuable asset to his employer. Well-known events pop up as background: the 1950s prosperity and confidence, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, roiling social changes. Bowman is dazzled by a Virginia heiress and marries her, and the almost universal opinion is that the marriage can’t last. It doesn’t. Theirs is an amicable separation and divorce. Terminations of subsequent relationships don’t often share that characteristic.

Bowman at times proves a rather aloof partner after the first blush of romance fades. And through it all, we witness all levels of society, and are reminded throughout that the rich get what they want and treat others with disdain and customary contempt. Women raise their voices and push for liberating reforms, but these trends play a secondary role, behind Bowman’s exploits with women. He has one rather passionate relationship with a woman by whom he is utterly starstruck; she betrays and nearly ruins him financially. This event and its aftermath form the main nexus of the plot.

The hero serves as witness to social changes, even if they don’t affect him directly very often. Salter’s descriptions vary between uncannily beautiful and workmanlike. Character motivations strike as deeply true, and action has a gratifying inevitability. We are treated to numerous brief departures from the main course of action: generally these are background sketches of a minor character whom we don’t encounter again. They serve to round out the narrative, add color and depth, showing how social and sometimes insular the New York publishing world was at that time.

I found All That Is quite well-crafted but only moderate in its rewards. I’ve seen deeper and higher praise for it from media outlets, but it doesn’t dazzle me that way. This is not written to highlight arcane truths or to commemorate lofty ideals; its focus on the sexual exploits of its hero, and how he affects and treats his  partners detracts from any such loftier ambition. 

 

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"Daniel Martin" by John Fowles

 

Renowned British novelist John Fowles published Daniel Martin in 1977, and has said that it is his favorite of his novels (in a 1986 interview with Professor Emerita Susan Onega of the University of Zaragoza: Jonathan, Richard, “Maramarietta.com, 2025, https://www.maramarietta.com/the-arts/fiction/john-fowles/, retrieved June 9, 2025). It’s a challenging work of fiction, and shows Fowles to be a master of the form. It will reward readers who love sophisticated conversation; erudite analyses of aesthetics and psychology; inward dialogue; and unorthodox approaches to writing fiction.

Dan Martin is a British screenwriter who in the 1970s has achieved worldly success in Hollywood. He’s attended Oxford University, been married and divorced, has a grown daughter, and is in a relationship with a young actress about his daughter’s age. A man  with whom he attended Oxford (and is now a don) has fallen deathly ill and summons him from America because he wants to see Martin before he dies. 

The meeting proceeds but events take a sudden shocking turn. As a result Dan vaults into a bout of soul searching; he realizes he has been pursuing the wrong things, including his partners, in his life, and now has a clear vision of what, and whom, he wants to pursue.

And this in broad strokes is the plot of the novel. But recounting the plot does nothing to establish in the prospective reader’s mind the depth of Dan’s yearning, nor of the erudition with which he pursues his goals. There is a lot of give and take, a lot of conversational thrusting and parrying with his chosen lover/wife/partner to be.

Along with deep and sometimes persuasive discussions of society and philosophy in England and America, we encounter Fowles’s playing with the narrative: he switches from third person to first person in an effort, I think, to capture Dan’s approach to his writing, and his view of himself. The book is full of philosophical asides, but they’re always in service to the protagonist’s thinking at the moment.

I’m reining myself in from doing a more in-depth analysis of this book. I will say it is rich in sparkling true-to-life conversation, spot-on in the way inner dialogues of highly educated people flow, surprising in how the author plays with narrative in an ultra-modern way, and rewarding in its dénouement.

 

 

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"Atavists," Stories by Lydia Millet

 

The actors in Atavists, a set of 14 madcap stories from Lydia Millet, spout their harebrained opinions, where social media-connected teens of Gen Z and Millennials speak at cross-purposes, summarily correct each other’s political correctness, and dream trendy dreams and visualize leveraging them into celebrity and big paydays. Millet’s tone and content blend to produce frothy pitch-perfect comedy, while beneath it roil the real and apparently intractable 21st Century challenges.

The author weaves brief episodes in the lives of a few families and their contacts — friends, frenemies, exes, coworkers — into a single overarching plot that addresses  questions and gives the reader closure. Or at least a hint at closure.

I celebrate Millet’s ear for au courant patter and her unerring feel for the zeitgeist currently plaguing America. Characters pay close attention to their favored online platforms, combing through posts to follow, accuse, disparage, or glorify whomever might be in the crosshairs. They ponder the subjects and viewpoints they might use to influence followers, and how to monetize them. Or they want their trendy, buzzword-filled talking points to climb the best-seller list, thus proving their correctitude, and granting access to the hottest restaurants and resorts.

The author’s petard becomes crowded with all the hoisting. I love the fun she pokes at almost everything she sees, and I admire her tangential acknowledgement of the real issues facing the country, the economy, and the planet. Part of her design is to highlight the ineffectual lip service these characters pay to this toxic mix — their attitude, almost without exception — is to cite the issue in didactic terms to prove their superior correctness, and let it go at that.

Pick up Atavists and live alongside these modern-day players; they’re self-absorbed, glib, and out for ol’ #1, but some of them achieve wisdom, perspective, or perform a worthwhile charitable role. Millet is at the absolute forefront of current novelists writing in English, one of my very favorites. She shows a light touch with the fabulous foibles and an unblinking way with the cunning self-interest of her cast. Take and enjoy!

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"Theft" by Abdulrazak Gurnah

 

Wrenching life episodes told in plain language; human urges and inadequacies portrayed perfectly; the long-term inescapable consequences of life decisions—all these are on display in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s felicitous and big-hearted latest novel, Theft. Set in the author’s native Tanzania, the book takes up the lives of a couple of extended families, and explores themes of love, betrayal, class oppression, and international economics. It all seems so effortless, and it concludes in such a balanced and generous way. It’s quite artful and unreservedly recommended.

The events of Theft depend on complex family relationships, and they reflect a well-entrenched, if quirky, ethos. This culture reflects an openness to relatives in need, but the need arises from outmoded and frequently misanthropic attitudes. Young people are ostracized—shunted off into service to unfriendly relations and deprived of education—for the offense of having miscreant or unorthodox parents. Tourists to the area show off their wealth and their disregard for local customs and mores. This book contains an unveiled indictment of the systems that result in such abuses.

Gurnah, the 2021 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, composes in plain-spoken, unassuming language; he relies on it to carry the weight of the events which sometimes wreak havoc on his characters’ lives, which it does beautifully. These characters represent the full range of personalities—greed, prejudice, anger, generosity, respectfulness, acceptance—and the author unfailingly presents them as arising from the everyday human business of surviving. The tone is very effective; it’s all superb in his hands.

Generous, deceptively deep, and rewarding, this novel is well worth taking up.

 

 

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"Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson" by Darren Staloff

 

Subtitle: The Politics of the Enlightenment and the American Founding

Darren Staloff, Ph.D., a historian at the University of Florida, considers three prominent Founding Fathers in Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson. He takes up each with reference to their role in the founding of the United States, and with reference to each other. Using their own writings and extensive quotes from contemporary and later sources, he paints an extensive and even-handed portrait of each. Steeped in the thought and politics of the time, these in-depth sketches immerse the reader in the personality and the grand achievement of each. They will round out your understanding of each in grand if unblinking style.

In grossly broad strokes, mainstream Enlightenment thought rejected any appeal to the supernatural or divine revelation. This trend brought into common thought a disenchantment with the idea that the world was run by force of some supreme being, and contemplated instead, the natural forces which one could observe and test.

Continuing broadly, Hamilton used a superior mind and indefatigable energy to push through his vision of a strong central authority, with a central bank, a very active  commercial market, and government investment in infrastructure. In his view these  would together generate wealth and plenty for the new nation. This was at a time when the new country was overwhelmingly agrarian in nature, both in output and civic vision. Obviously his program ultimately carried the day.

Adams was a brilliant, sometimes prickly, always vain but honest statesman and politician, whose vision for the new Constitution was enacted in its entirety. I believe that any sharing of this credit, by any other contemporary thinker or Founding Father is illusory, and simple myth-building. Plain wrong.

Jefferson’s gift for lofty language created a grand American myth; his phrasing has inspired foreign revolutionary zealots and American schoolchildren alike. His presidency failed, however: the Embargo Act plunged the new nation into its first deep depression, and produced none of the desired results of projecting nascent American power internationally. In addition, his questionable parochiality about the slavery question, and his hare-brained scheme for solving it did nothing to prevent or forestall the bloody sectional conflict to come. In fact, it helped assure that the conflict would come.

As a history of the period, and three of its principal and most influential actors, this book is thorough and balanced  — excellent.

 

 

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"The Paris Express" by Emma Donoghue

Widely admired author Emma Donoghue manages to capture some version of fin de siècle zeitgeist while also spinning a suspenseful action narrative in The Paris Express. She sets her scene in an actual 1895 out-of-control express train that crashes into the Montparnasse station, and assembles within it a cast of historical figures, (some of whom were actually passengers on the wreck). This clever device gathers together key figures who represent the coming train wreck that is the 20th Century. It’s a bravura performance; I recommend it for its intelligence, its respect for its readers, and not least for its breathless pacing.

A national railway express leaves Granville on the Normandy coast bound for Paris, and its passengers include a handful of deputies, or representatives, of the Orne Department of France. The author also calls “all aboard” to scientists, prominent engineers and captains of industry, and literary and artistic lights of the period, and a very angry young anarchist with a bomb. Donoghue names and clearly identifies these souls in the novel. The author mounts an elaborate, nail-biting race against death, in a highly diverting, and very well-organized novel.

And the interaction of these disparate characters, along with the threat to everyone’s life, along with the speed of the action, all make for a very rewarding, heart-quickening experience. This mélange represents for me the headlong speed and power of wrenching change the world will suffer as the 19th Century swings along into the 20th. For on this train is a French automotive pioneer and industrialist Émile Lavassor; Irish dramatist John Millington Synge; Max Jacob, the French poet and painter; Henry Tanner, the African-American painter; and Marcelle Lapicque, a neurophysiologist who lived until 1960. This is not an exhaustive list, but it illustrates the grand scope of Donoghue’s story, in that it brings all these characters into play. The momentum, the dreadnaught, irresistible forces in play, would wreck any static edifice in its way, be it Montparnasse station, or any settled, backward-looking lassitude. I was quite out of breath at the end of this book.

The author shows a steely discipline as she yolks her wildly divergent elements into a cohesive, yet breakneck, story. It’s very well done.


 

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