Orbital is conceptually simple yet unique. It follows a single day aboard an international space station, where six astronauts and cosmonauts go about their work, maintaining their craft, conducting scientific experiments, exercising, and observing and recording activity on Earth as they hurtle around it at incomprehensible speed. In the twenty-four hours covered by this slim novel, its protagonists will observe sixteen sunrises and sunsets on the planet below. In between the details of the day, we get sketches of the lives the six crewmembers have left behind.

In Ascension is a novel is five parts, a languid yet grandiose journey that takes us from the deepest depths of our oceans to the farthest reaches of the solar system, set around a decade from now. Its protagonist is Dr Leigh Hasenboch, who we first meet in Rotterdam, in a section that focuses on her childhood. Her father, Geert, worked on flood defenses in the Netherlands, a centuries old challenge that is becoming ever more impossible as the climate breaks down, causing a similar deterioration in Geert's mental health, which in Leigh's telling we understand to be a motivator behind his outbursts of severe violence towards his daughters (her younger sister, Helena, is crucial later on.)