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I must have a thing for science writing (in this case, a barely fictionalized trip aboard the International Space Station) juxtaposed with highly literary writing. Orbital gave me a similar frisson to John McPhee's writing in Annals of the Former World, which takes an artistic, philosophic eye to geology and the origin of our physical world. Likewise, Samantha Harvey takes her six astronauts on a philosophic spin (on 16, in fact) around the earth, sometimes dialing in the microscope to their relationships and hang-ups, letting us experience the ravages of a typhoon on the ground or seeing the view from space as the astronauts wield their cameras. Much emotion is packed into this little book that is hard to describe, while very little "happens" in the traditional plot sense. Gorgeous, a tear-jerker (for me anyway) that offers up our beautiful mess of a species and our home.