Synopses & Reviews
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024
Winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize
Shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction
A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours
A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one
day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected
for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the
program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--from America,
Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan--have left their lives behind to
travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth
reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief
communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them
whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in
regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form
bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we
are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their
experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking
constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and
surprisingly intimate.
Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.
Review
A New York Times and Booklist Editors' Choice
"Ravishingly beautiful." -- Joshua Ferris, New York Times
"Samantha Harvey, one of the most consistently surprising
contemporary British novelists, becomes something like the cosmic
artificer of our era with her slim, enormous novel Orbital (Grove), which imaginatively constructs the day-to-day lives of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Orbital
is the strangest and most magical of projects, not least because it's
barely what most people would call a novel but performs the kind of task
that only a novel could dare . . . [Harvey writes] like a kind of
Melville of the skies." -- James Wood, The New Yorker
"Coming from five different countries, the space travelers represent a
microcosm of humanity. This is a beautifully written, deeply thoughtful
meditation on planet Earth and our place in it."--Library Journal, Starred Review
"Luminous and profound, Orbital is hard to put down and even harder to forget." --Booklist, Starred Review