Orbital

Genre

Science Fiction & Speculative Fiction

Publisher

Jonathan Cape (Penguin Random House UK)

Publication year

2023

ISBN

9781787334342

Over a single day, Orbital follows six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station as they complete sixteen orbits of Earth. Samantha Harvey's short novel has little conventional plot; instead it observes the planet below, the routines of the crew, and their reflections on...

For a single day and sixteen orbits, Samantha Harvey's slender, luminous novel holds us aboard the International Space Station with six astronauts and cosmonauts as the Earth turns beneath them. 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. For readers open to fiction that slows down and looks up, it is quietly extraordinary.