Mary Roach is an essayist in the Susan Orleans tradition, but perhaps more like Orleans’s dark twin. Her unerring taste for the offbeat and mordantly macabre found its purest outlet in her best-known book Stiff, which looks at what happens to corpses. (The person next to me on a plane back from the US asked me to put it away. I had been reading the chapter on air crash forensics.)

Here she concentrates not on space flight itself, but on what happens on the ground (the testing, the simulations and the preparations), all of which she approaches with an eye for the absurd.