Orbital
by Samantha Harvey
Summary
Six people are aboard the International Space Station for one day. Four astronauts and two cosmonauts, from countries that are not on good terms, sharing a small tube of air while the planet turns underneath them sixteen times.
Almost nothing happens. They exercise, they run experiments, they eat, they watch a typhoon assembling over the Philippines and can do nothing about it. One of them learns her mother has died and has to continue her shift. The first lunar expedition in decades launches during their shift, and they understand that they are already the old technology.
What Harvey is really writing is sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets, and the book is closer to a long poem than to a novel. The prose does the work: continents slide past, weather systems turn, borders become invisible, and the argument about the fragility of the thing they are looking at is made entirely through description rather than assertion.
It is only 136 pages and it is not a book you race through. Readers who want plot will be disappointed, and say so loudly. Readers willing to be still with it describe a genuine shift in perspective, which is the effect astronauts report and which Harvey is deliberately trying to reproduce on the page. Read it slowly, ideally in one or two sittings, and let the repetition do what it is designed to do.
A good choice for anyone who has drifted away from fiction and wants something short, beautiful and undemanding of plot. A poor choice for a reading group that likes to argue about what happened, since almost nothing does.
Historical Context & Significance
Orbital won the Booker Prize in 2024, the first book set in space to do so. At 136 pages it is the second shortest winner in the prize's history, behind Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore from 1979,.
Edmund de Waal, chairing a panel that included Sara Collins, Justine Jordan, Yiyun Li and Nitin Sawhney, called it a book about a wounded world and said the judges had wanted something with capaciousness and resonance that they felt compelled to share. He described a novel propelled by the beauty of sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets, in which everyone and no one is the subject, and credited Harvey with making our world strange and new for us.
Paul Lynch, the previous year's winner, presented the trophy at Old Billingsgate in London.