Description
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024 - A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
**New York Times Book Review 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.
Product Details
| Publisher | Grove Press |
| Publish Date | October 29, 2024 |
| Pages | 224 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780802163622 |
| Dimensions | 7.2 X 4.9 X 0.7 inches | 0.3 pounds |
About the Author
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.
Reviews
Praise for Orbital
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
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
"Samantha Harvey, one of the most consistently surprising contemporary British novelists, becomes something like the cosmic artificer of our era with her slim, enormous novel Orbital (Grove), which imaginatively constructs the day-to-day lives of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Orbital is the strangest and most magical of projects, not least because it's barely what most people would call a novel but performs the kind of task that only a novel could dare . . . [Harvey writes] like a kind of Melville of the skies." -- James Wood, The New Yorker
"Samantha Harvey's compact yet beautifully expansive novel invites us to observe Earth's splendour from the drifting perspective of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they navigate bereavement, loneliness and mission fatigue. Moving from the claustrophobia of their cabins to the infinitude of space, from their wide-ranging memories to their careful attention to their tasks, from searching metaphysical inquiry to the spectacle of the natural world, Orbital offers us a love letter to our planet as well as a deeply moving acknowledgement of the individual and collective value of every human life." -- The Booker Prize Judges
"Harvey's lean and meditative fifth novel takes place on a space station circling Earth over a single day, as the mission's crew of six astronauts from around the world makes a community in the absence of family or gravity. Their rare vantage point affords new perspectives on the planet below, including the lives they left behind." -- New York Times
"Samantha Harvey's meditative novel portraying life aboard a spacecraft contains on almost every page sentences so gorgeous that you want to put down the book in awe. . . . A thrilling book, filled with marvel at the beauty of creation made palpable in bravura descriptions . . . The sense of wonder and delight conveyed by Harvey's elegant prose and philosophical musings makes this a deeply pleasurable book for serious fiction lovers." -- Wendy Smith, Boston Globe
"Set on the International Space Station over 24 hours, this short and lyrical novel charts the lives of the six people in the cramped spacecraft as they observe the world beneath them, in all its beauty and vulnerability." -- Edmund de Waal, The Week
"Harvey has created a wondrous and timely hymn to life on Earth . . . [She] vividly renders the practical and emotional details of life in space, from the cargo cubes that contain trash to the talismans and images each astronaut has brought on board. . . . Perhaps the most important aspect of the book is its interpretation of the experience of seeing Earth from outer space. . . . If Harvey meant Orbital as a tiny, 200-page chance to consider it all from a different perspective, her clarion call could not have come at a better time."-- Marion Winik, Minneapolis Star
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