Orbital (Booker Prize Winner)

Winner of the Booker Prize 2024
Winner of the Hawthornden Prize
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction
A New York Times and Booklist Editors' Choice
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of the Year
Stephen Colbert's The Late Show Book Club Pick
A Best Book of the Year from Oprah Daily, Financial Times, Globe and Mail, Chicago Tribune, and The Guardian
A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 from Literary Hub
A Most Anticipated Book of Fall from the Guardian and Los Angeles Times

"Ravishingly beautiful." - Joshua Ferris, New York Times

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 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.

Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels, Orbital, The Western Wind, Dear Thief, All Is Song, and The Wilderness, and one work of nonfiction, The Shapeless Unease. Orbital was the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, and her other work has been shortlisted for the Women's Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Prize, and the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness was awarded the Betty Trask Prize. She lives in Bath, UK, and teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.