Deep Wheel Orcadia

Deep Wheel Orcadia
by Harry Josephine Giles

 
Publication Date: October 2021

 
Winner of the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Book of the Year, Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel takes the reader on an unique galactic journey punctuated by the dialect of the Scottish Islands.

 
Filled with the captivating and imaginative poetic verse that Harry Josephine Giles is known for, Deep Wheel Orcadia is an exceptional and standout science fiction novel that blends a beautiful Scottish dialect with a story of belonging.

Astrid is returning home from art school on Mars, seeking lost inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that they never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind.

Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science fiction verse-novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry comes with a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the reader will miss no nuance of the original. The rich and varied cast weaves a compelling, lyrical and effortlessly readable story centred around place and belonging, generation and gender politics, love and desire all with the lightness of touch, fluency and musicality one might expect of one the most talented poets to have emerged from Scotland in recent years.