Orbital: A Novel by Samantha Harvey

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024

“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… which imaginatively constructs the day-to-day lives of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station… [T]he 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, writing like a kind of Melville of the skies, finds that fitting surplus again and again.”—The New Yorker

“Harvey makes an ecstatic voyage with an imagined crew on the International Space Station, and looks back to Earth with a lover’s eye . . . An Anthropocene book resistant to doom.”—Guardian

“Beautiful . . . [A] gorgeous meditation.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Slender, gleaming . . . luminous prose”—The Spectator

“Harvey lavishes the planet with her considerable rhetorical gifts, but the recklessness and miseries we know at pavement level have been scrubbed from her observation deck. It is all angels above, devils below. But then, those transporting riffs, those fine rhapsodies! The novel’s refreshing view of Earth restores some of life’s original magic, calling to mind a third, unmentioned image — any one of last year’s Webb telescope photographs, which trounce despair by returning the stargazer to innocent spectacle. Sometimes, wonder and beauty suffice.” New York Times

Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels, Orbital, The Western Wind, Dear Thief, All Is Song, and The Wilderness, which won the Betty Trask Prize, and one work of nonfiction, The Shapeless Unease. Her books have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, and the James Tait Black Prize, as well as longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize. She lives in Bath, UK, and teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.