Orbital
A Novel (Booker Prize Winner)
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4.2 • 287 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024 • A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
**New York Times Book Review Book Club Pick**
**Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show Book Club Pick**
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
Shortlisted for the 2024 Climate Fiction Prize
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024
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
"Ravishingly beautiful." — Joshua Ferris, New York Times
A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, 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.
Customer Reviews
Imagination and imagery
Beautifully written and deeply thought provoking story on a unique topic. Flowing imagery makes the space journey so realistic. Has a good shot for the Prize, but may have had one orbit too many.
Stellar Space
I didn’t really care for this book. I’d read the reviews listened to a few podcasts about, so I knew what to expect. But it was still just too slow for me. The writing was terrific as all reviewers seem to agree but it felt very repetitive. How many times can you describe the shape of South America?
Us, from a critical distance
At once an informative immersion into life on the International Space Station and achingly beautiful meditation on the fragility and resilience of human existence on the blue planet below.