Available 1 November in major bookstores
The Gentle Orbit
Michael meets Anna on a beach in Ibiza, a quiet, instant connection, the kind of afternoon you spend years thinking about.
But before anything can form, she drifts into someone else's orbit, and Michael is left in the space between almost and everything.
The life Anna returns to looks like love from the outside and feels like a prison from within.
Michael can't rescue her. He can only be there. And sometimes that's everything.
Restrained, tender, and deeply personal, The Gentle Orbit is Johan's second novel, a literary story about timing, proximity, and the people who orbit our lives without ever quite landing.
What Early Readers Are Saying
Meet the Author
Johan M Raubal
Writes about the small moments that change people. His fiction follows ordinary people as their lives move somewhere they had not expected, leaving space for the reader to decide what those moments mean.
Hannah, his debut novel, began with a glance across a train platform.
The Gentle Orbit, out 1 November, follows Michael and Anna across nearly two decades. Beginning with their meeting on a beach in Ibiza, it traces two lives that repeatedly move towards and away from one another, through friendship, other relationships, family life, abuse, loss and survival.
He also writes non-fiction as Johan Raubal.