Satellite Love

Book excerpt: A beautifully unconventional debut novel about a girl, a boy, and a satellite—and a bittersweet meditation on loneliness, alienation, and what it means to be human. Longlisted for Canada Reads, shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction and for Speculative Fiction. Named CBC Radio's Q Book Pick of the Month, a CBC Books Spring Reading List Title, a Shelf Life Books Book of the Month, a Toronto Life and Nikkei Voice summer read recommendation, one of Daily Hive's 10 Essential Reads to Celebrate Asian Canadian Writers, and one of Quill & Quire booksellers' Books of the Year. On the eve of the new millennium, in a half-forgotten city in southern Japan, sixteen-year-old Anna Obata looks to the stars for solace. An outcast at school, and left to fend for herself and care for her increasingly senile grandfather at home, Anna copes with her loneliness by searching the night sky for answers. But everything changes the evening she falls in love with the Low-Earth Orbit satellite (LEO for short). In a desperate act of longing and imagination, Anna calls Leo down to Earth, where he embarks on an extraordinary journey to understand his own humanity as well as the fragile mind of the young woman who conjured him into being. As Anna withdraws further into her own mysterious plans, Leo will be forced to question the limits of his devotion to his creator and the lengths he will go to protect her. Marvellously inventive and yet grounded by a profound understanding of the human heart, Satellite Love is a brilliant and deeply moving meditation on loneliness, faith, and the yearning for meaning and connection. It is an unforgettable story about the indomitable power of the imagination and the mind’s ability to heal itself, no matter the odds, no matter the cost.