Orbital: Winner of the Booker Prize Paperback – 27 Jun. 2024

Halfway through this extraordinary novel I had my doubts. After all, you could say that it’s all about going round and round in circles. But in the end Samantha Harvey very much more than justifies her Booker.There are writing gurus who swear that the fundamental secret, bar none, to all good writing is the sentence: get that key component right and you’re on a winning streak from the off. If that were all there was to it, even then Harvey would certainly be a winner. Her sentences are beautifully structured and sparkle and shimmer with wit, insight and feeling. She’s a born writer, but her novel goes way beyond the mere accomplished sentence. The centre of her book is the visionary experience of the Earth seen from space. Oh, the stars and the moon come into it too, but what concerns her are the six astronauts (well, four astronauts and two cosmonauts, Russians) in the space station two hundred and fifty miles above the planet.Orbital is a close, intimate recreation of twenty four hours in the lives of these two women and four men, confined in their cramped metal container as it spins through sixteen orbits, working its way over continents, islands, seas and deserts, while they experience sixteen sunsets and sixteen sunrises (a helpful map at the start shows you their detailed trajectory). They carry out their set routines of cleaning and maintaining the craft, performing the vital physical exercises to keep themselves trim in a weightless environment, and carrying out various scientific experiments. Chie, for example, the Japanese crew member, rejoices when the lab mice she’s supervising finally learn to float, instead of desperately trying to rely on non-existent gravity. Meanwhile, she grieves for her mother, back in Japan, who has just died. She recalls her favourite moments with her, but will miss the funeral.Other events outside impinge. They witness the build up of a super-typhoon in the Pacific, but beyond reporting back to mission control, are of course powerless to do anything about it. They enthusiastically follow the launch of a new Moon-landing expedition, not a little envious of their fellow astronauts. They fret about home and families, treasure the few mementoes mounted around each of their individual cramped sleeping quarters.But the centre of everything is what they see through the windows: ‘They don’t know how it can be that their view is so endlessly repetitive and yet each time, every single time, newly born.’ They experience ‘A sense of gratitude so overwhelming that there’d be nothing they could do with or about it, no word or thought that could be its equal…’In the end, Harvey’s sense of the extraordinary adventure of orbiting in space, witnessing the marvel of the globe beneath you, widens out into an enthralling vision of mankind’s future explorations and the planetary wonders beyond Earth.

Orbital is really unlike anything you’ll ever read. It takes you on an unforgettable journey, painting a breathtaking picture of our world, of space and everything in between. We see how a voyage around Earth affects six astronauts with varying stories to tell. It’s a beautiful balance of the every day happenings of a space venture, combined with such profound questions and discussions about our existence, what everything means, who we are, where we’ve come from. And I guarantee you’ll be left thinking about what comes next. What else is out there. What it means to be here, alive and present. It’s fascinating, deeply thought-provoking, awe-inspiring. It will fill you with a new found sense of gratitude and wonder. Brilliant!However, if you're looking for a plot, you'll not really find one. It feels more like a love letter to the universe, to the beauty of Earth. If you look at it from this perspective, you'll see it definitely achieves what it sets out to do!

I was completely underwhelmed by this book. I appreciate the quality of the writing but a book really should do more than muse poetically on space/earth/humanity. The characters are generally indistinguishable from each other, I lost track of whose insights I was reading. Surely they would also occasionally have original or distinct thoughts. To sum up: No dialogue, no plot, no characters worth speaking of, no relationships, no story arc or theme. The book just drifted - presumably as an echo of the relentless slow/fast drifting of the ISS itself. Would have made a nice literary essay. Feels overly self indulgent to try to expand it into as a book and in the end it just bored me.

Best book I have read in a long time. The backbone narrative of astronauts and cosmonauts circling the earth in the space station provides an anchor for many tangential discussions of beauty, astronomy, space exploration, relationships, climate change, man’s place in the universe and more. All beautifully described. Bravo.

Read on Kindle - finished July 2025This book is more like a painting. Samantha paints beautiful pictures using beautifully collected words in lovely sentences. It’s wonderfully written. There is a real sense of tumbling over and over. There is almost a cadence to the words and sentences. A bit like a very long poem. I would love to go up to space and see the pictures that she has painted. It would be amazing.I enjoyed the book because it was so beautifully written and loved the images it conjured up.