Orbital: Winner of the Booker Prize 2024: ‘Awe-inspiring’ Max Porter
Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, Samantha Harvey's Orbital takes place almost entirely aboard the International Space Station, where a small crew of astronauts goes about the quiet business of science: gathering weather data, running experiments, pushing the body to its limits. But the heart of the novel lies in what they do between tasks. They watch. Sixteen orbits of the Earth in a single day, glaciers giving way to deserts, mountain ranges dissolving into open ocean, season after season compressed into hours. It's a lot to take in, and Harvey makes you feel every second of it. Yet for all that distance, the world below refuses to let go. Word arrives of a crew member's mother passing away, and suddenly thoughts of home press close. A typhoon coils over an island where people they love are living, and the crew watches it build, caught between wonder at its sheer force and dread of what it will leave behind. That tension, between the sublime and the devastating, runs quietly through the whole book. Harvey writes about human fragility with a precision that borders on the philosophical. The further her characters drift from Earth, the more fiercely they feel bound to it. Questions begin to surface naturally, almost inevitably: what does human life amount to without a planet to hold it? What would Earth be without the people looking back at it? Edmund de Waal, who chaired the Booker judging panel, described the novel as reflecting Harvey's remarkable attentiveness to a world that is both precious and precarious. It's a fair summary. Orbital is compact, serious, and quietly arresting, a book that earns its praise without raising its voice.
- Author: Samantha Harvey
- Publisher: Vintage
- Genre: Short Stories
- ISBN: 978-1529922936
- Pages: 144 pages