Sixteen sunrises, and the plot is the Earth
Six people on a space station, one day, sixteen times around the Earth. There is a typhoon forming, and a crew somewhere else is going to the moon, and a piece of a painting one of them loves. Nobody is trying to get home against the odds. If you need a malfunction, this is the wrong book. I almost put it down after thirty pages because I could not find the story. Then I noticed I had stopped skimming, which is not what I do with a book that has no story. I was following the light on the ocean.
Harvey moves between them without making any one of them the hero. A Japanese astronaut thinks of his mother. A British astronaut thinks of a postcard. The station work is repetitive on purpose: experiments, exercise, the same window, a different continent. What changes is the planet, and the fact that they can see a storm that the people under it cannot see whole. I did not feel lectured about how small we are. I felt the particular boredom and affection of people who live at work, and who happen to have the best view on the planet of the place they cannot touch.
I read it in two evenings. The second evening I was less impatient. That seems to be the only way the book works. It is short. It still asks you not to rush a day that contains sixteen sunrises.