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Showing 1 - 12 of
12 matches in All Departments
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Orbital
Samantha Harvey
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R633
R507
Discovery Miles 5 070
Save R126 (20%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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 an eloquent meditation on space and a
moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet.
The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst
of hopeful colour. A novel of wonder, Orbital is nature writing
from space and an unexpected love letter to life on Earth 'This
generation's Virginia Woolf' Telegraph Six astronauts rotate in
their spacecraft above the earth. They are there to 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? 'Harvey writes with
hypnotic power and poetic precision about - well, about everything'
Mail on Sunday
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Dear Thief (Paperback)
Samantha Harvey
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R421
R347
Discovery Miles 3 470
Save R74 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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This genre-defying debut memoir by Betty Trask Prize winner,
Samantha Harvey, weaves a tapestry of confessional anguish, flash
fiction, cathartic poetry, and feverish observations on politics
and psychology in a transcendent search for reality and truth. 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).
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Dear Thief (Paperback)
Samantha Harvey
1
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R309
R251
Discovery Miles 2 510
Save R58 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize Longlisted
for the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction Longlisted for the
2015 Jerwood Prize In the middle of a winter's night, a woman wraps
herself in a blanket, picks up a pen and starts writing to an
estranged friend. In answer to a question you asked a long time
ago, she writes, and so begins a letter that calls up a shared past
both women have preferred to forget. Without knowing if her friend,
Butterfly, is even alive or dead, she writes night after night - a
letter of friendship that turns into something more revealing and
recriminating. By turns a belated outlet of rage, an act of
self-defence, and an offering of forgiveness, the letter revisits a
betrayal that happened a decade and a half before, and dissects
what is left of a friendship caught between the forces of hatred
and love.
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE 2019** 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.
This genre-defying debut memoir by Betty Trask Prize winner,
Samantha Harvey, weaves a tapestry of confessional anguish, flash
fiction, cathartic poetry, and feverish observations on politics
and psychology in a transcendent search for reality and truth. 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).
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.
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.
**Featured on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read** 'A profound meditation on
language and loss and time, and on how we construct ourselves
through stories. And it's painful. And it's beautiful. And I love
it.' NATHAN FLIER Samantha Harvey's insomnia arrived, seemingly,
from nowhere; for a year she has spent her nights chasing sleep
that rarely comes. She's tried everything to appease it. Nothing is
helping. What happens when one of the basic human needs goes unmet?
For Samantha Harvey, extreme sleep deprivation resulted in a raw
clarity about life itself. Original and profound, The Shapeless
Unease is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing
and influence, death and grief, and the will to survive. 'A delight
to read... ineffably rewarding' OBSERVER '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 'How can a book about a sensual
deprivation be so sensuous and so full? ... it seemed to give my
sleep resonance and poetry. What a beautiful book.' TESSA HADLEY
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.
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