Orbital

‘I wanted to write about our human occupation of low earth orbit for the last quarter of a century – not as sci-fi but as realism. Could I evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer? Could I write about amazement? Could I pull off a sort of space pastoral? These were the challenges I set myself.’

Read the full interview here.

‘In an unforgettable year for fiction, a book about a wounded world. Sometimes you encounter a book and cannot work out how this miraculous event has happened. As judges we were determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share. We wanted everything.

‘Orbital is our book. Samantha Harvey has written a novel propelled by the beauty of sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the Earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones.  With her language of lyricism and acuity Harvey makes our world strange and new for us. 

‘All year we have celebrated fiction that inhabits ideas rather than declaiming on issues, not finding answers but changing the question of what we wanted to explore. Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share.’ 

James Wood, The New Yorker

‘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, 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.’

Wendy Smith, The Boston Globe

‘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 […] Harvey, the author of four previous novels, expertly compensates for the absence of a conventional plot by immersing us in the drama of the stars.’

Alexandra Harris, The Guardian

‘Orbital is a hopeful book and it studies people who act on their hope. It’s an Anthropocene book resistant to doom. We might miss the restless anger that tossed about in The Shapeless Unease, and the acerbic, downright forms of expression it found for itself. But Orbital offers vehement appreciation of the world in a range of tones and situations.’

Lucy Scholes, The Telegraph

‘Orbital is very much a work driven by language, so traditionalists be warned: there’s scant plot or action. Word arrives that the mother of one of the astronauts has died; another notices a lump growing on his neck; someone else worries about his friends back on earth, whose village is being hit by a typhoon. Such moments are fleeting, glimpsed briefly from the reader’s own spinning journey through the characters’ minds; tension is neither created nor resolved. Just as, from their unique vantage point, national borders on the Earth seem dissolved – all they see is “just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war” – so the divisions between individuals seem to dissolve as well. These are beings untethered from the relationships, drives and desires that governed their lives on terra firma.’

Alice Jolly, The Sunday Times

‘The strength of this book lies in Harvey’s stunning and rhythmic descriptions of this constantly unravelling world […] Her book may lack traditional plot, but the beauty of the prose engages the reader fully and, overall, this is an uplifting book.’