Orbital
Six people circling the Earth and thinking about being alive. Harvey wrote the most beautiful novel of 2023 in only 136 pages. Every sentence earns its place.
Sixteen Orbits
Samantha Harvey's 2023 Booker Prize winner is set on a space station in low Earth orbit where six astronauts from different countries spend a single twenty-four-hour period completing sixteen orbits of the planet. There is no conventional plot. Instead Harvey moves between the crew members' thoughts, their observations of storms and coastlines and cities below, their relationships with loved ones they have left behind, and the profound dislocation of seeing the Earth as a small, fragile, beautiful object in cold space. The novel won the Booker Prize in 2024 and was praised as a masterpiece of quiet, lyrical prose.
Reading Orbital
Feeling
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Orbit
"Here is a thing they know: the planet is not theirs. They are its.
"Samantha Harvey
Harvey has written about struggling with chronic insomnia and about lying awake watching the ISS track across the sky on a NASA app. The novel emerged from that experience of looking up at people circling in the dark.
The novel is the shortest Booker Prize winner in recent memory at 136 pages. The prize committee cited its formal ambition and the quality of its prose as evidence that length is irrelevant to literary achievement.