Don't read this for the plot or the characters - you will be disappointed. There is barely any plot to speak of, and while we do get to see a bit more of the characters and enter into their backstories and their lives a bit, it feels like the main objective of both is to serve as vehicles for the author to think, contemplate, and reflect about cosmic existence.

This is for the people whose first answer to "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was "An astronaut". This is for the people who are both in awe of the magnificience and miraculousness of our planet but yet enjoy the cosmic nihilism of thinking about just how small and insignificant we are.

It does a pretty good job at putting you into a perspective that most of us would never have the opportunity to see first-hand - being an astronaut orbiting Earth, looking down upon our planet from an almost god-like view, seeing the beauty and the disaster of nature and only being able to wonder or to despair at it, but ultimately being helpless about it all.

Lots of this read like an essay, and Harvey uses some pretty intricately formulated sentences - just shy of being purple - so I took longer than expected to get through such a short book. Even after finishing the book, I haven't gleaned fully all of what it wanted to say. But some of the thoughts and quotes here really just hit the nail on the head for me.

"This thing that harbours us humans who polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are."

"And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, 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 enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through."

"It’s a feeling he has almost perpetually when here, in both the biggest and smallest of moments – this belly-chest knowing of the deep beauty of things, and of some improbable grace that has shot him up here in the thick of the stars."

Overall, this book was a beautiful and vulnerable contemplation of the miracle of life blended with the cosmic despair and wonder of our small, tiny existence in space-time.