In January, a field of books was delivered to my home, the primary of many to reach, with a steadiness that may at occasions really feel overwhelming. I used to be about to spend the 12 months as a Booker choose.
All my life I’ve dreamed of getting swathes of time crammed with nothing however studying. But as I stared at that first tranche of books, my overriding feeling was apprehension. Awarding a prize with the ability to rework literary historical past, in addition to the winner’s profession, isn’t a job to take frivolously. Plus, I’d been warned that every choose could be required to learn greater than 150 books over seven months; a weight loss plan, it appeared to me, with a excessive probability of leaving me feeling force-fed and unable to abdomen studying a novel ever once more.
The studying was certainly relentless. From January to July, the strain to maintain up with it colonised my ideas whereas the books themselves colonised my home. I learn at each probability I acquired and, sure, I did learn each ebook (the query I’m requested most frequently); although I’ll confess that within the pursuits of time I used to be grateful at any time when I got here throughout a brief novel, or a horrible one. I learn like I did once I was a teen, voraciously, and on a regular basis – one thing I haven’t had the posh of doing since I gave delivery to my first baby. However above all, what distinguished this studying expertise was the edifying firm I saved, within the type of my fellow judges: the artist and author Edmund de Waal, author Yiyun Li, Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan and musician Nitin Sawhney. I started to learn with their voices in my head, as in the event that they too have been colonising my ideas. That refrain formed my studying, made it extra interrogative but additionally extra delicate. Over the course of the 12 months, what had all the time been an inherently personal act started to really feel deeply communal.
Our 12 months was subdivided by greater than books. In February got here the information that Yiyun’s son, James, had died. In March, we discovered of Nitin’s coronary heart assault and emergency surgical procedure; in April, that Justine’s father had handed away. Inexpressible sorrows, that might have fractured our shared sense of objective. But, as Yiyun stated, literature was nonetheless a spot the place we may meet and discuss. In not possible circumstances, we continued to learn, and to debate what we had learn.
Solely on reflection do I see that the shortlist that emerged from our discussions was dominated by themes of escape and retreat, and that most of the books happened in cloistered settings, each actually – in Charlotte Wooden’s masterful Stone Yard Devotional, the protagonist leaves all the pieces behind for a lifetime of atheistic contemplation at an remoted convent – and metaphorically – in James, Percival Everett’s miracle of interiority, escape is discovered within the lifetime of the thoughts. Held by Anne Michaels is an interstitial contemplation of affection and grief that at occasions appears to retreat into its personal adverse house, as if looking out there for a form of solace. The acerbic narrator of Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake defects from the world by levels with fantastically sardonic impact, whereas in Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, the central characters’ obsession with each other envelops them in eroticism in addition to unstable concepts of residence, amid experiences of post-war dispossession.
Within the wake of all the pieces that had occurred, it felt at occasions as if we judges have been just like the six astronauts in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, sealed into the sheltered house these books have been constructing round us. So maybe it’s no shock that after we emerged from that house to decide on our winner, asking ourselves which ebook we most wished to press into the fingers of as many readers as potential, we voted unanimously in favour of Orbital. In providing us the angle of these astronauts observing the Earth from the Worldwide Area Station, it had pulled us as far-off as potential from our planet, with the unusual and totally compelling impact of neutralising earthly issues whereas on the identical time throwing them into the starkest reduction.
Orbital is such a small ebook, however it appeared as if all of life was in it. And even from such a distant, airtight vantage level, it felt achingly intimate. In my copy, I’ve scribbled notes between the traces of textual content (a certain signal a ebook has grabbed me by the throat). One in all them reads: “This can be a ebook we’d like now, however it might even be a ebook we’ll want without end.” I can consider no increased advice.
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Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Classic Publishing, £9.99). To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Supply costs could apply.
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