ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey — Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize
Samantha Harvey’s beautiful and hypnotic novel, Orbital, has just been awarded the Booker Prize 2024!
Chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, describes the winner as ‘a book about a wounded world’, adding that the panel’s ‘unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition’ .
Harvey said of writing Orbital: ‘I thought of it as space pastoral – a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space’.
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part — or protective — of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?