Tim Peake Audiobooks

Space: life in orbit reported by the first Briton to fly for the European Space Agency

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Who is Tim Peake?

Major Tim Peake, born in 1972, is a retired British astronaut, Army Air Corps officer and author – and a genuine piece of national space history. He was the first British astronaut to fly with the European Space Agency, only the second to wear a United Kingdom flag patch after Helen Sharman, and the sixth person born in the UK to serve aboard the International Space Station.

Selected by ESA, he began the agency’s intensive astronaut training in 2009 and graduated at the end of 2010. That trajectory – military aviator turned spacefarer turned writer – gives him a rare kind of authority: when Peake describes flight, risk or the view from orbit, he is not relaying other people’s experiences but reporting his own.

Tim Peake in audiobooks

Space writing and audio are natural partners – there is something fitting about hearing these stories told aloud, the way most of us first encountered them – and Space, Peake’s title in our catalogue, benefits enormously from its author’s first-hand credentials. This is the cosmos explained by someone who has actually been up there, with a working astronaut’s grasp of the details that documentaries tend to skim.

For UK listeners there is an extra pull: Peake is our astronaut, the man who carried the flag to the ISS, and his perspective comes with a distinctly British lack of swagger. Ideal listening for anyone whose younger self ever stood in the garden looking up.