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

A book of wonder, Orbital is nature writing from space and an unexpected and profound 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?

Just Around The Bend: Más o Menos explores the intriguing concept that just beyond our current reach lies everything we've been eagerly anticipating—world peace, winning the lottery, and a blissful retirement. However, the energy and drive needed to enjoy these blessings, should they manifest, seem to have been left behind in our past.

The buzzword is 'Now', yet we often find ourselves on either side of it. Caught up in the rituals of daily life, we rarely pause to ponder profound questions like 'Know Thyself' and 'Who am I?' Perhaps we've missed something along the way or prefer to live with the mystery, content with superficial 'poster' philosophy.

If 'poster' philosophy leaves you feeling dissatisfied, then this book, covering a range of mind-stretching topics, might be just what you’re looking for.

In 1975, Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooded room furnished with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider, and one person." For the next two years, she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice, death, and the will of God.

In Holy the Firm, she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, and about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls "the hard things—rock mountain and salt sea," she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a veil or air, the power play of holy fire.

This is a profound book about the natural world—both its beauty and its cruelty—that Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, knows so well.