Orbital

There is scarcely a plot; there is instead attention - to the choreography of weightless routine, to a typhoon gathering far below, to the private griefs and wonderings the crew carry into orbit. Harvey writes with a poet's exactness about a planet made suddenly small and borderless, and about the strange intimacy of six people sealed together above it.

The book is a meditation as much as a narrative, closer to a secular prayer than a thriller, and its rewards are contemplative: the shock of scale, the fragility of the living world, the ache of looking down on everything you love. Compact enough to read in a sitting yet vast in implication, it made history as the first novel set in space to win the Booker Prize.