Samantha Harvey with Max Porter for Orbital

Described as "this generation's Virginia Woolf," Samantha Harvey is the author of novels such as The Wilderness, All Is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind and a work of non-fiction, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. We also very fortunate to be able to describe her as a long-time friend of the bookshop.

Her work has been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award, the Women's Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize. She is a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

Now, Harvey joins us alongside the brilliant Max Porter to discuss her new novel Orbital. A book of wonder, Orbital is nature writing from space and an unexpected love letter to life on Earth.

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?

The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour.