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- [00:00]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey there, Ryan Reynolds here. It's a new year and you know what that means. No, not the diet resolutions. A way for us all to try and do a little bit better than we did last year. And my resolution, unlike big wireless, is to not be a raging and raise the price of wireless on you every chance I get. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch $45 upfront payment required.
- [00:22]
Samantha Harvey
Equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first 3 month plan only. Taxes and fees. Extra speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited. See mintmobile.com for details.
- [00:37]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, there you are out there sitting eagerly by your telephone, your computer, your whatever it is you use to listen to. The bookcase with Kate and Charlie. And per usual, I'm Charlie.
- [00:48]
Kate
I'm the Kate part. I just was wondering, how does one sit eagerly? How does one sit with eagerness? I'm not sure that's possible.
- [00:56]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, you have anticipation on your face. You're leaning forward in the chair.
- [01:00]
Kate
Maybe your butt's doing a little moving in the chair. I don't know.
- [01:04]
Ryan Reynolds
Could be doing some chair dancing, I suppose. You're very good at that. When you were growing up, you were very good at chair dancing.
- [01:12]
Kate
Thank you.
- [01:13]
Ryan Reynolds
It's a gift. It's a gift.
- [01:15]
Kate
It's an important gift. It's an important gift that can get you a lot of money when you grow up.
- [01:22]
Ryan Reynolds
Right. I am so delighted to say we have this week the winner of the Booker Prize. I think that's as prestigious an award as any novelist can win. British awarded to the best novel in the English language. For that year in 2024, the Booker judges decided that the winner which. Who was something of a long shot. Well, not something of a long shot. She was a long shot. Samantha Harvey for her novel Orbital. And this is a novel almost like nothing else I've ever read. Kate.
- [01:57]
Kate
Yeah, I know. It's very different and I think it flies. It fl in the face of that old adage that writers should only write what they know, Samantha Harvey decided to do. I love the way she describes it. I've heard her describe Orbital in interviews as a space pastoral, which I think is a really interesting way of describing it. It's a slice of life, of astronauts orbiting the earth with grand, beautiful language. But it also emphasizes the loneliness of space, how strange space is. And that's. All of this is amazing how well she pulls this book off because one, and I hate to say this because I think it's going to turn our listeners off and I really don't Want you guys to be turned off. Go out and read this book. It is compulsively readable, I promise you. And I say that considering the fact that there isn't really a plot. I called you up, I remember about halfway through and said, so what happens in this book? And you said, well, nothing. And you said, but are you enjoying it? And I said, I'm enjoying the hell out of it. The language is so beautiful, and the picture she's painting of the views you get in space are so majestic. So it's really amazing. Very little happens in this book. And it's a small book. Who knows?
- [03:16]
Ryan Reynolds
Who knows? The construction of the book is one day in the life of six astronauts who are circling in the space station. Different nationalities, and then two Russians as well. But she says Kate's right. She calls it a space pastoral, but it's also. And one of the lines of my favorite lines of hers is, it's a celebration of Earth's beauty, but with a sense of sorrow because of what we're doing to it. I think I read one of the reviews that said it's a love letter to Earth. And I think that's a very good description. Her prose, as Kate says, is beautiful. And we asked her, because it is unusual, to give us just a sense of the way she writes.
- [03:57]
Samantha Harvey
It's made of rock, but appears from here as gleam and ether. A nimble planet that moves three ways in rotation on its axis, at a tilt on its axis and around the sun. This planet that's been relegated out of the center and into the sidelines, the thing that goes around rather than is gone around, except for by its nobble of moon, this thing that harbours. We humans who polish the ever larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us however smaller we are. And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe, but that it's a universe of sidelines, that there is no center, just a giddy mass of waltzing things. And that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind's ego by the instruments of scientific inquiry, until it is that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.
- [05:03]
Ryan Reynolds
She has such a gentle manner. She's very English. And she lives in. I think I read she lives in a more rural part of England. Doesn't have a social media account, God bless her. And I thought I said she doesn't even have a cell phone. But Kate's right. She's taken on something very, very risky in trying to give you a sense of what it's like to be in space without her ever having to.
- [05:27]
Kate
Yeah. I wondered when I was finished this book, how would this book be different if Samantha Harvey had actually been to space? There's this great moment in Contact, which is the Jodie Foster film, which. There's this great moment where she's in space and she's in tears because of the views she's seeing. And all she can say over and over is, they should have sent a poet. They should have sent a poet. And so I wonder how this book would have changed if Samantha Harvey had been through space. Because if you listen to those prosecutors, it is majestic and inspired enough to feel like an eyewitness account. It's amazing what she's done in this book.
- [06:02]
Ryan Reynolds
When you read it, she gives you a great sense of verisimilitude, of having been there. And as I said to her, what I've always wanted covering the space program was for them to send a poet or a writer into space. Because the astronauts, God love them, but they're all test pilots or they're not necessarily people who are well versed in writing. And I wanted somebody to give me a sense who was a great writer, what it was like, and she's done it without having been there. Judge for yourself. Here's our conversation with Samantha Harvey, the author of the Booker Prize winning novel for 2024, Orbital.
- [06:41]
Kate
Samantha Harvey, it is such an honor to have you in the bookcase. Orbital, the 2024 Booker Prize winner. We loved this book, but having finished it, I'm not entirely sure what it is. Now, if you're running a bookstore, where would you shelve it? Would you shelve it in fiction, science fiction, philosophy? Like, where would you put Orbital?
- [07:04]
Samantha Harvey
Fiction, without doubt, is definitely a novel. The idea of this book was that it was. It was science based, but that it was realism. It was about literary realism and the experience that we do have as a species of. Of living in space, which we have been doing for the last 25 years. So I see it very much, very squarely as literary realism.
- [07:30]
Ryan Reynolds
That's an interesting phrase, literary realism. Samantha. I have, as somebody who covered the space program, as a journalist, I kept wishing that they would send up into space a writer who could somehow grasp and convey with the magnificence of language exactly what an incredible experience this is. Nobody's been able to do it. They were going to send a teacher into space, but they haven't sent a writer. But you did it and you did it without going. And I want to know how you did it when you set out to do this, what was going to be your approach and what was going to be your research?
- [08:08]
Samantha Harvey
Yeah, it's a really interesting point, isn't it, about this writing and this sort of artistic responses to something like space travel. Because people who go there typically are scientists, you know, they're jet pilots and so on, and they're not, you know, that. That isn't their business to, to find the words to convey what they've seen. And I felt that very strongly and I was doing my, my research. You come across a lot of frustration, I think, amongst astronauts because they can't put into words what they've seen. And I think it's interesting that something like space and the ISS belongs to us all, not just in a sort of mundane sense, that we all in some way pay money towards it through our taxes, but it belongs to a kind of public imagination. And I was quite interested in tapping into that, that sort of. Not trying to pretend that I had been, because of course I haven't, and that's obvious, but trying to tap into something of a. A public consciousness about the experience of being there and to see if we can go somewhere with the imagination that maybe experience can't. If there's something in that, in the fact of my not having gone, that gives me a little bit of creative freedom in trying to imagine my way into the gaps and the uncertainties.
- [09:35]
Ryan Reynolds
But how did you research it? Did you talk to astronauts? In the acknowledgments you mentioned NASA and you mentioned the European Space Agency, but did you talk to astronauts and did you get a sense from them that you felt you could translate into giving the writer some verisimilitude of what it's like to be there?
- [09:54]
Samantha Harvey
Yeah, I didn't talk to astronauts. I read a lot of books by astronauts and I read a lot of accounts on the NASA and ESA websites and a lot of old archived material from both the ISS and mia, the Mir space station. I didn't speak to any astronauts, partly because they're not that easy to pin down, partly because I wanted, and I think this is always true when I write, I wanted to just be able to inhabit an entirely fictional space of my own that I could improvise within and to create my own characters, to not be using other astronauts as a template and so on. So I read a lot of their accounts. That was a core part of the research and I watched a lot of footage of the Earth. I think this is, by and large a visual book. It's about the imagery of the Earth from space. So that was very important to me to just track hundreds, thousands, probably of hours of ISS orbits. But I didn't speak to astronauts. I have since spoken to astronauts, and they have read it, and we have spoken. You know, I've spoken to one NASA astronaut quite a lot about the book and about her experience of being in space. And that's been really, really wonderful and nourishing and a little bit daunting.
- [11:18]
Kate
I was about to say I would be so intimidated, because if that conversation started with, no, Samantha, that's not what it's like at all, I would just hang up. I'd be like, I don't. Bad connection. But it seems to me that what you've done is incredibly daunting as a writer. Not only are you writing about that's outside of the realm of your experience, but you're trying to describe the limitless, the hugeness of space. How, as a writer, did you get over the intimidation of writing about something that was so far outside of your experience? And then how did you go about using language to convey? Cause I kept saying to my father, reading this book reminds me of watching 2001. It's just huge. And so how, as a writer, did you go about breaking that hugeness down into language that readers could relate to?
- [12:07]
Samantha Harvey
I really resonate with what you're saying because when I first started writing this book, I. I wrote about 5,000 words. And I gave up. And it wasn't because I thought, this is too difficult for me to do, but because of that exact intimidation, you know, I thought I wasn't intimidated by the subject matter. I was intimidated by a sense of a trespass, that this wasn't mine to write, that nobody would frankly want to read it. Because why would you want to read a book about being in low Earth orbit written by someone who's never been there, when there are books that exist that are written by people who have been there? You know, what was I trying to do that an astronaut or cosmonaut couldn't do? And I lost my nerve with it. And it was only. And I came back to it sort of by chance, actually, and. And liked what I had written and thought that it had a kind of sincerity. I suppose it's a strange word to use, but I felt that it was coming from somewhere that was true. And it was sort of necessary, something that I really wanted to say. So I decided I just had to try to make it work somehow on its own terms. And as for how, I mean, you know, in a sense, it's joyful as a writer, to be able to. To grapple with limitlessness. And once I decided that it would be told through lots of different voices and registers, and I wasn't going to be confined to one person's point of view or to one voice, first person, third person. Once I decided I could shape shift and I could have a panoramic sort of elastic view, then it was fun, and it was really good fun to write. And I. I had a sort of principle in my mind which was an emotional one. I guess that was born of the images that I was looking at. When I looked at those images of the Earth from space and the video footage, I had a certain set of feelings that were quite overwhelming. That was sort of the motivation for wanting to write the book. Very. Almost like being in love. A very expansive, kind of wonderful, giddy feeling. And that's what I wanted to put onto the page. I wanted it to be an emotional project that was largely joyful and expansive and rapturous, I suppose, enraptured. So, although that's not a very technical answer, I had that in my mind and in my heart all the way through the writing of this book. And whatever I was writing, I would come back to that feeling. Or I'd ask myself, is this thing I've just written coming from that feeling? And if not, it can't stay. I need to keep returning to that expansive place in myself and write from there, Because I know that feeling. That's true. I can write from there. That's where the veracity of the book is and its sort of integrity. So that was sort of how I went about it at an emotional level, which I think is how I do write.
- [15:02]
Ryan Reynolds
Anyhow, we've been asking authors, and I find it fascinating. What do you want the reader to feel when they put down the book? And I didn't feel at all that this was mundane. And indeed, I say this somewhat hesitantly because who am I to tell the writer what she wanted me to feel? But when I put it down, I thought, this is a plea. It's a plea about the preservation of this Earth that appears so fragile from space, conveying the sense that there are awful things going on down there. But from up here, where I can see the totality of Earth, it's a different story, and we can't afford to do harm to this. What did you want the reader to feel when you put down the book.
- [15:45]
Samantha Harvey
I wanted. Well, this might sound trite, but I wanted the reader to feel whatever it is he or she feels. I think we can't be prescriptive about that as writers, but because it was an emotional project for me and it was born of this feeling of beauty, of joy, of rapture, I suppose that I would like the reader to feel those things or to sense the energy of those things in the book and then to go wherever he or she will go with that feeling. I often get asked if I think the book is optimistic or pessimistic, and I think it really is neither one of those because or it's both of them, whichever you choose, because it's about imparting a feeling to the reader and for the reader to go wherever he or she goes with it, to take it, assimilate it. And if that makes you feel optimistic and to feel, oh, you know, as a species, we're okay, we have this beautiful planet, everything will be okay, then take that message, if you will. If you take it as a plea, I would be very happy with that. I feel for myself a certain growing frustrated urgency around our response to climate change and what we're doing to the biodiversity of the earth. And I don't for a moment have a neutral position on this. So. But, but I also didn't want to preach in the book. That wasn't what it was about for me. As I say, it was about this feeling. So whatever you take from it, you take from it, and I think that's completely valid. But if it is a call to action in some way in the reader, then that is more than I could ever have hoped for.
- [17:51]
Ryan Reynolds
So we'll pause for a moment and come back with a little more conversation with Samantha Harvey.
- [18:03]
Kate
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- [18:33]
Samantha Harvey
This.
- [18:34]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [18:35]
Kate
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- [18:38]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [19:02]
Charlie Gibson
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Kate
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Charlie Gibson
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- [19:30]
Kate
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- [19:31]
Samantha Harvey
Expires in 6 months.
- [19:39]
Kate
My experience generally with books like this is that they establish a strong and magnificent background and then we get to know the crew, and the crew, and their conflict among them becomes the plot. But in this, in some ways, it's sort of a portrait of a day in the life of this crew orbiting the planet. And I'm interested because we don't, in some ways, as readers, get to know these characters intimately. And so I wanted to know if you, as an author knew these characters intimately. Like did you have a whole biography of these astronauts before they ended up on the big metal h floating over Earth? Or did you know them obliquely, as the readers do?
- [20:18]
Samantha Harvey
That's a really good question. I think it varies from character to character. Some I know better than others. When I made a first draft of this book, it was told entirely from the point of view of one of the astronauts, of Nell. So I know her much better than I know some of the others. For example, I probably know the Russian. I probably know Anton the least. Sorry, I probably knew Roman the least. Actually, I came to understand a bit more about Anton as the book went on. But probably Roman' most obscure to me. So it really depends. I don't know them all equally, but I. But for me, this was such a shift in process because all my other novels are written solely from the point of view of one character, and I love to do that. And I love to take one human consciousness and explore it quite deeply. So it was really strange thing for me to decide to move away from this, this approach and to have six characters who none of whom are the other main character, you know, that they're not supposed to be. And I don't want the reader to know more about them than one would know beyond this one day. And I don't want to put them in conflict with one another. And I think that's A really. That was really important to me. Sort of had in my mind this question about drama. And how can a book create drama or be propulsive or have momentum without conflict? And what is it to write a conflictless narrative? And if you don't have conflict, which is the great generator of plot and of story, how can you get your reader to turn the page? How can you make your book suspenseful in a different way? So these were all questions that were really on my mind as I was writing. I'm very interested in that as a reader and as a writer. You know, how. How to write without conflict, how to suspend the reader, how to create a dream, sort of a dream state.
- [22:23]
Ryan Reynolds
One of the things that I thought was so interesting in your approach was the contrast of the magnificence of what they were seeing when they would look out at Earth, and the mundane of taking a mouse in your hands and feeling its heartbeat and doing an experiment with the mouse and cleaning up the space station. Having to vacuum around and get things out of the grill that sucks up everything as it floats in space. And I wondered what you were thinking. Was that a really conscious thought that I want to put this at a human level of they're having to clean up where they are and this incredible adventure that they're on. And how did you set about to do that?
- [23:04]
Samantha Harvey
Yeah, that's exactly it. That mundane domestic nature of life there really struck me as I was researching the book. I think I read in a book by one astronaut. I can't remember who it was. The astronauts saying that they spend a preposterously large amount of time in orbit just packing and unpacking things. Because space is so short. It's quite a cramped environment. And they're getting these resupply vehicles coming up and bringing supplies, and they have to unpack those and then pack up all the waste that has to go out or all the stuff that has to go back to Earth. And it's like a 3D puzzle, you know, because they're always trying to deal with very small amounts of space. And, you know, if they're. If they're not vacuuming and dusting, then they're doing maintenance on one of the modules or they're fixing the toilet or they're feeding the mice or whatever. So it is a highly domestic environment, you know, And I thought that was really fascinating. That's part of this. This sort of magical draw of the place. I think that it is both sort of majestic and domestic at the same time. It's extraordinary. And it's very mundane, and I really find that fascinating for a writer, that's such rich territory. You know, it's so brilliant to be able to write a realist kind of domestic novel in such an extraordinary setting, you know, And I, of course, you know, I haven't been there, so I can't know what it's like. But I think that the imagination has a lot to play with there when you're sort of. You have this juxtaposition of vacuuming and, you know, the Arctic just casually gliding beneath you.
- [24:52]
Kate
But that's one of the things, too, that fascinated me about the book was the number of paradoxes. They're on top of each other and they're incredibly lonely. They live between awe and panic. It's majestic and mundane. Were you sort of aware of all the opposing paradoxes of space before you started to write? Or is it something that you discovered as you started to write? How many opposites come together in that manner of living?
- [25:17]
Samantha Harvey
These were all discoveries for me. Yeah, a sort of wonderful discovery, as you're right, that sort of simultaneous agoraphobia and claustrophobia and of this great sort of. Maybe a. A more philosophical level. This. This great overview, this ability to see, for example, the typhoon coming, this great godlike view, but absolutely no power to do anything about it. So I think that there seemed to be a kind of energy that was. That was arising from all those paradoxes and the kind of. The impossibility almost, of living. Of living them. You know, how do you maintain all these opposites at once? And no wonder astronauts find it so difficult to try to convey what it is they experience, because it's just so strange and so contradictory.
- [26:14]
Ryan Reynolds
One of the things I've been interested to talk to astronauts about when I had the honor of meeting many of them as a journalist, was whether this brought them to faith. Whether they went up with faith and it increased it, whether it gave them faith that they didn't have before when they saw this orb down there, 250 miles down, or whether it actually took away their faith, Whether they in some way found it diminished by the realities of what they were viewing. Did you come away with any feeling about that, and did it change you as you wrote about it and looked at all these pictures and thought about it?
- [26:57]
Samantha Harvey
I have read different accounts that astronauts have given about faith, and it seems really individual. I think all of those possibilities that you just outlined are probably true. Some go there and acquire faith, some maintain a faith, or it becomes strengthened or it becomes more nuanced. Or subtle. Some lose faith. I must say I haven't read about any who have lost faith, but I think that that's just such a personal thing. And I touched on it very briefly in the novel, in a section about Nell and Sean. Nell being a Christian and. Sorry, Sean being a Christian and Nell being agnostic, and how they arrive at their respective views based on exactly the same experience of looking out at the cosmos and looking down at the earth. Having exactly the same data, if you like, but arriving at opp, and I find that really interesting.
- [27:56]
Ryan Reynolds
The Booker Prize. First of all, may I be the 7342nd person to congratulate you. And. And there is.
- [28:04]
Kate
I'll be the 300 and whatever the number is. 343rd. Congratulations.
- [28:08]
Samantha Harvey
Thank you.
- [28:09]
Ryan Reynolds
And it is. It's a big. It's a big darn deal. It is a big deal. And to be a judge to have the finest novel of the year, it's. It's just extraordinary. You were a long shot, I think that's fair to say. I read a lot of columns about those books that had been shortlisted and then who would win. And yet you did. So when they called you and told you you had won it. Talk me through the emotion. Were you surprised? And what does it portend for you in terms of your future as a writer? Does it change your thoughts about your career?
- [28:42]
Samantha Harvey
These are all really good and complex questions. I think for a start, was I surprised? Utterly, yes. I have, I suppose in some sense built my, my career on a sense of myself as a sort of underdog, I guess, and. And I've grown to be quite content with that, you know, of having sort of a nice number of readers and sort of good, good critical receptions, you know, some reviews, do a few festivals and, and you know, in a. In a short while it's all done and I just carry on writing and in a sense I was very comfortable with that life. So that shift to no longer being an underdog is a little bit of. It's quite abrupt psychological transition to make. And you don't get a phone call, you're at a ceremony and there's a dinner, you have to sort of sit through a three course, three hour meal together, about 400 people in the room, everyone pretending that everything is perfectly normal. And then there's this long buildup and then finally they announce the winner. And I was so utterly convinced that it wasn't going to be me that I think I just went into shock when my name was called and stared at the sort of put My head into my hands and couldn't get, couldn't get my head out of my hands again. And I think everyone around me was trying to sort of get me up onto the stage. It was a complete shock to me and I don't yet know how it will change things. I mean, life is a lot busier. There is a certain background glow to everything now, I would say, you know, this lovely gleam of the Booker that is always there, which is very lovely. You know, you'll just be sort of cleaning the fridge or something and then remember. And it sort of has, you know, brings this lovely glow to life. So that, that's really, it's a really wonderful, amazing thing. And it takes away a lot of pressures and it brings some new pressures. It is a bit like being hit by a bus as well.
- [31:02]
Ryan Reynolds
But a nice bus, the nicest of buses.
- [31:06]
Samantha Harvey
A gilded bus.
- [31:07]
Kate
Yeah, a unicorn of a bus.
- [31:11]
Samantha Harvey
Exactly. I, I don't know. I mean, it's come at a very good time in my career. I think I'm six books in, sort of five novels and one one work of non fiction in. I sort of know how to navigate things now and I feel sure enough about my own writing and, and my own sort of artistic integrity, I suppose, to, to not feel too much pressure. But let's see, I mean, I may have to eat my words.
- [31:42]
Kate
Well, it was a well deserved winner of the Booker Prize. This book conveys the awe and the majesty of space and we were hooked. Thank you so much, Samantha Harvey, for joining us.
- [31:52]
Samantha Harvey
Thank you for having me.
- [31:58]
Ryan Reynolds
Some rapid fire questions for Samantha Harvey. If somebody offered you a trip into space, would you take it?
- [32:04]
Samantha Harvey
No.
- [32:07]
Kate
Fair enough. I know you teach creative writing. Is there a book that makes it onto your syllabus again and again and again?
- [32:14]
Samantha Harvey
Oh, gosh, yes. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
- [32:18]
Kate
Why?
- [32:19]
Samantha Harvey
It's such a. It's a masterpiece. I think it feels incredibly modern despite being 100 years old. And it's a really good look at how to write consciousness without any rules. It's entirely unconventional, rule breaking. And I think it's very good for writers to learn early on to have no sense of convention in their minds.
- [32:44]
Ryan Reynolds
What was the best book you read as research?
- [32:48]
Samantha Harvey
I would say it was a book by the astronauts. The Italian astronaut, Samantha Cristoforetti. It's called the Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut. I read that cover to cover and I have hundreds of bookmarks in there and bits that I have underlined and used as intel in my book.
- [33:11]
Kate
You said you've spoken to an Astronaut. Since the book was released, I wonder if you have a favorite piece of feedback from an astronaut that's read the book.
- [33:19]
Samantha Harvey
Well, one thing she said, which I thought was really amazing to hear, was that she felt that I had at times managed to put into words something that she had felt and sometimes put into words something that she hadn't quite registered she'd felt, but which my book sort of helped her to see her way into. Which I thought was the highest compliment I could have hoped for.
- [33:46]
Kate
My last question is, Rhys, when you're editing, do you read aloud?
- [33:50]
Samantha Harvey
Well, I have to confess, I don't. I make my students do this and make them read aloud and I don't do it myself.
- [34:00]
Kate
Oh, we busted you. All your students are going to know now.
- [34:03]
Samantha Harvey
Yeah, I know. I know. Terrible. What a terrible hypocrite I am. I know that I should. I know it's the right thing to do. And sometimes when I'm giving a reading to an audience, I think wish I had read this aloud when I was writing it because I would edit this sentence down. It doesn't have the right cadence. It doesn't have the right musicality. It needs to lose three syllables at least. That word doesn't work. I know that it's the right thing to do, but something about it is so cringe worthy to me that I just cannot do it.
- [34:37]
Ryan Reynolds
Samantha Harvey, it is a pleasure to talk to you.
- [34:40]
Samantha Harvey
Thank you. It was my pleasure, too. Thank you so much.
- [34:47]
Ryan Reynolds
So it was a lovely conversation. I really, really enjoyed talking to her. She is not overwhelmed by the acclaim that has come to her winning the Booker Prize. And it really is a big darn deal. And she didn't expect it, which makes it even nicer, I think.
- [35:05]
Kate
Yeah. And I think of this book as a sort of Rapunzel like accomplishment. You know, the troll left in the room full of straw that has to make gold by the end of the day. That's what this book is to me. What she did was very hard and she did it. And if I could just make one more pitch to our listeners, I always try to read like one or two other books by the author that we're speaking with, if I haven't read them all already. And I picked up the Shapeless Unease, which is also by Samantha Harvey, which is the best book. It's a nonfiction book about her experience with insomnia. And it is as good a book about insomnia as I have ever read. It captures that feeling that you have when you're trying to hold your body still and sleep, but your mind won't stop sprinting and you're panicked about it. And again, to me, I just bring that up because she accomplished something incredible with that book and she accomplished something incredible with this book. This is a very ambitious writer and she pulls off what she tries to do, which is very impressive.
- [36:05]
Ryan Reynolds
And that effort certainly recognized by the Booker Prize judges prepping her for having written the outstanding novel of 2024, which makes us so pleased that she joined us and that we had a chance to talk to her.
- [36:17]
Kate
I wanna say one more thing before we go, which is we haven't done bookstores and I just wanna say that's partially because my father has been floating in the ocean for the last two or three weeks. So our connecting and doing these interviews has been a modern marvel of technology, but it has also been hit or miss and we didn't want to subject any bookstore as to. Are you there?
- [36:39]
Ryan Reynolds
Hello?
- [36:39]
Kate
Are you there? So we will resume bookstore as soon as he is shoreside, which will be next week. And I look forward to it, his welcoming him home.
- [36:49]
Ryan Reynolds
I have had a lovely time at sea. It is my job to book the bookstores. Katie arranges our authors, I get the bookstores. And I've done a lousy job of it being at sea for the last 10 days, but it's been a lovely cruise on the newest of the Cunard ships from Southampton to New York. So here are the folks who work on this program and afterwards, what I think is a really interesting and nice coda from Samantha Harvey.
- [37:12]
Kate
The Bookcase with Kate and Charlie Gibson is a production of ABC Audio and Good Morning America. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions. Our executive producers are Laura Mayer and Simone Swink. We want to make mention of Taylor Rhodes, Amanda McMaster and Sarah Russell at Good Morning America and Josh Cohen, Asal Asanapour, Meg Fierro and Amira Williams at ABC Audio.
- [37:33]
Samantha Harvey
When I first started Orbital, when I was thinking about writing a book set in space, I'd written to myself, what do I want this book to be about? And to my surprise, because I had forgotten I'd written this, I had a quote as an answer to that question and it was a very famous quote from the Dalai Lama, which is be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
- [37:59]
Charlie Gibson
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