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. 

Roman 

Roman is a Russian cosmonaut. He has been in space for 434 days. He is the current commander and said to be ‘dextrous and capable’, and able to fix anything on board. 

Anton 

Anton is the second Russian cosmonaut. He is ‘quiet, and dry in his humour’ and said to be ‘the spaceship’s heart’. He is described as sentimental and cries openly at films and the awe-inspiring scenes outside the craft’s window. He often spends time reflecting on his marriage back home, which has run its course.  

Chie 

Chie is Japanese. Her mother has just died, while Chie was in space. Now an adult orphan, she is coming to terms with long-distance grief. She is the craft’s ‘conscience’, described as methodical, fair and wise. 

Pietro 

Pietro is Italian. He is said to be the mind of the spacecraft, and ‘an astronaut to his bones’. 

Shaun 

Shaun is American and is the soul of the craft. He leans on his faith while in space and believes the universe is entirely made by design.  
 
Nell 
 
Nell is British and is the breath of the craft (‘with her eight-litre diving lungs’). Her husband lives on the family farm in Ireland, a home she has barely seen due to her work commitments.

Samantha Harvey lives in the UK and is a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. 

She was first longlisted for the Booker Prize for The Wilderness in 2009. She is also the author of the novels All is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind, and a work of non-fiction, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. She has been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award, the Women’s Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness was awarded the Betty Trask Prize.  

The New York Times 

‘The book is ravishingly beautiful. It is also nearly free of plot. No alien race invades. No sentient planet turns people mad. The technology behaves. The astronauts are consummate professionals. One is described as the heart of the ship, another its hands, a third its conscience. No trial tests these claims, and no event comes along to reverse or strengthen them. Orbital is an assiduous day-in-the-life account of characters whose main business is to serve the riff — on deep space, cosmic time, climate change, the meaning of life, the existence of God, the nature of progress.’ 

Wendy Smith, Boston Globe 

‘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. In the first two paragraphs, which introduce us to six sleeping astronauts, we find: “Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it is stalking through their quarters”; and, “Outside the earth reels away in a mass of moonglow, peeling backwards as they forge towards its edgeless edge.” There are no big personal conflicts in Orbital and only two notable events, which both take place below them on Earth, but 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.’ 

Alexandra Harris, the Guardian 

‘With this slender and stretchy fifth novel, Harvey makes an ecstatic voyage with an imagined crew on the International Space Station, and looks back to Earth with a lover’s eye. Orbital goes into flight for a single day, though a day is a different kind of thing up here, where “the whipcrack of morning arrives every ninety minutes” and the sun is “up-down-up-down like a mechanical toy”. It’s a nicely giddying structural ploy to align each chapter with an orbit of the Earth: 16 orbits all together. The mobile narrative sends out probes into past and future, but all is held in the looping motion of elliptical travel.’ 

Susie Mesure, iNews 

‘Harvey blends prose of poetic beauty (“over its right shoulder the planet whispers morning – a slender molten breach of light”) with a clarion call to take responsibility for where we live. “Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?”’ 

Kirkus Reviews 

‘…Overall this book is a meditation, zealously lyrical, about the profundity and precarity of our imperiled planet. It’s surely difficult to write a book in which the main character is a giant rock in space—and the book can feel ponderous at times, especially in the middle—but Harvey’s deliberate slowed-down time and repetitions are entirely the point. Like the astronauts, we are forced to meditate on the notion that “not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s…a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre.” Is this a crisis or an opportunity? Harvey treats this question as both a narrative and an existential dilemma…’ 

‘By positioning the entire planet within a single narrative frame, Orbital blurs distinctions between borders, time zones and our own individual stories. This is a vantage point we haven’t encountered in fiction before, and it is infused with such awe and reverence that it reads like a love letter, an act of worship.

‘In offering us a vision of our planet as borderless and interlinked, Harvey makes the case for the futility of territorial conflicts, and the need for co-operation and respect for our shared humanity. This is a theme that couldn’t be more sobering, timely, or urgent.’ 

‘I’ve been looking at images of Earth from space for years. There’s a live camera from the ISS – you can watch the astronauts do spacewalks. Doing multiple orbits of Earth for months online made me want to try to do justice in words to the beauty of the Earth and how I feel about the unnerving fact of its aloneness – could I do justice to that in the way an image can? I put astronauts in it because the novel needed a heartbeat, but they’re just part of the image, not the lens.’ 

Read the full interview in the Guardian. 

In a recent interview with the Booker Prizes, Samantha Harvey said she ‘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’. In doing so, Harvey wondered if she could ‘evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer’. Do you think she succeeded in this approach? How does her depiction of space travel compare to both traditional sci-fi and nature writing? 

Orbital takes place over a single day, a Tuesday in October. During the course of that day, the craft orbits Earth 16 times. How does the author use the concept of time to structure the narrative? What effect does this one-day snapshot have on the reader’s understanding of the characters’ experiences and the sense of time in space? 

Harvey frequently uses metaphor throughout the novel. ‘Gran Canaria’s steep radial gorges pile the island up like sandcastles hastily built, and when the Atlas mountains announce the end of the desert, clouds appear in the shape of a shark whose tail flips at the southern coast of Spain, whose fin-tip nudges the southern Alps, whose nose will dive any moment into the Mediterranean.’ How does her use of these devices enhance the reader’s ability to visualise the astronauts’ experience? Does it make these extraordinary, otherworldly events more relatable? 

Throughout the novel, Harvey makes several implicit references to climate change. ‘Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic is crafted in large part by the hand of politics and human choices.’ Discuss how such references function as part of the subtext of the novel.  

The novel contrasts the astronauts’ cyclical, repetitive day-to-day activities in space, such as exercise, sustenance, maintenance and chores; with the vast, dynamic life on Earth below. How does Harvey use this juxtaposition of perspective to balance the novel and explore the relationship between the micro (the astronauts’ world) and the macro (the billions of lives on Earth)? 

In a review for The New Yorker, James Wood writes that ‘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. It’s barely a novel because it barely tells a plotted set of human stories, and the stories it does tell barely interact with one another.’ Do you agree Orbital is ‘barely a novel’? Discuss the absence of conventional plot and how this affects the reading experience. And if it’s not really a novel, what is it? 

Orbital contains numerous references to past events in the lives of the astronauts. How do these references shape our impression of the characters, and enhance the novel’s depth? Would it have been a different novel without these backstories?   

Harvey’s prose is often repetitive and looping, and deployed with a rhythmic style. How does this impact the reader’s experience and the novel’s overall tone? 

Harvey’s work has drawn comparisons to Virginia Woolf from both readers and critics. In a recent interview with the Guardian, she said, ‘I admire Woolf probably more than any other writer I can think of. I didn’t think about parallels with The Waves while writing Orbital, but I can see there’s something [similar] about the way voices surface and dissipate. If the influence was there, it wasn’t conscious.’ In your reading of the novel, do you see similarities between Harvey’s work and that of Woolf?  

Orbital touches on themes of religion, meaning and existentialism, as the astronauts grapple with their place in the universe while observing Earth from above. How does Harvey explore these big themes, within the context of their confinement? In what ways does the characters’ isolation amplify such existential questions?  

NPR: ‘Orbital’ captures one day in the life of six astronauts 

The Readings Podcast: Samantha Harvey in conversation

The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey 

The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey 

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes 

The Employees by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken 

The Waves by Virginia Woolf