Orbital

Orbital is Samantha Harvey's 2023 fifth novel, the Booker Prize winner of 2024 and one of the shortest novels ever to win the Booker (136 pages, less than half the length of most prior Booker winners of the past decade). The structural premise is the single day spent by six astronauts and cosmonauts at the International Space Station orbiting Earth sixteen times - Roman (the Russian commander), Anton (the second Russian), Pietro (the Italian), Shaun (the American), Chie (the Japanese cosmonaut), and Nell (the British cosmonaut). The novel runs the single day across the sixteen orbital passes, with the rotating consciousness of the six crew members providing the structural ensemble across the broader meditation on time, geography, weather, and the operational mechanics of long-duration spaceflight from inside the station itself.

Harvey's structural method is the patient close-third-person omniscient construction across the six rotating consciousnesses, with the Earth-from-space material providing the structural counterpoint that the orbital perspective uniquely enables. The novel reads in the patient literary-essayistic register that Harvey has been refining across the broader catalog (Dear Thief 2014, The Western Wind 2018) and that distinguishes Orbital from the broader contemporary literary fiction tradition on spaceflight (Apollo memoirs, Mary Roach's Packing for Mars, Ariel Waldman's Out There). The Chie subplot across the entire novel (her mother's death back on Earth that the crew receives word of midway through the day) carries the structural emotional weight; the typhoon-over-the-Philippines material across the middle orbits carries the structural meteorological-and-environmental weight that the broader contemporary spaceflight-and-climate literary fiction has been working toward.

Recommended as required contemporary British literary fiction reading, as the canonical 2024 Booker Prize winner, and for fans of contemporary literary fiction across the spaceflight-and-climate subgenre. Compare to Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir), Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguro), and contemporary literary speculative fiction. The Sarah Naudi audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.