Orbital
Six people are sealed inside a space station, spinning around the Earth at seventeen thousand miles an hour. Over the course of a single day they will witness sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets, watching whole continents, oceans, and weather systems slide beneath them in silence. There is no plot in the ordinary sense — only the work of the mission, the small routines of confinement, and the planet turning below.
Two Russian cosmonauts, Roman and Anton, share the craft with Shaun from America, Pietro from Italy, Nell from Britain, and Chie from Japan, who is quietly carrying the recent death of her mother. As they run experiments, exercise, eat their rehydrated meals, and take their turns at the window, their thoughts drift across the lives they left behind, the fragile beauty of the world they are circling, and a typhoon gathering far below over the Pacific.
Samantha Harvey's Booker Prize-winning novel is a short, luminous meditation rather than a thriller — a hymn to the Earth seen from just far enough away to love it completely. In spare, radiant prose it holds ordinary human longing against the vastness of space, and finds in one unremarkable orbit something close to the sacred.
One of the two Russian cosmonauts aboard the station.
The second Russian cosmonaut, quiet and dry in his humour; described as the craft's "heart".
An American astronaut who leans on his faith in orbit and believes the universe is made by design; the craft's "soul".
An Italian astronaut, "an astronaut to his bones"; described as the craft's "mind".
A British astronaut, described as the craft's "breath".
Orbital won the Booker Prize in 2024, announced at Old Billingsgate in London on 12 November — the first book set in space to take the award. It also won the Hawthornden Prize in 2024. It was additionally shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, though it did not win either.
Not in the conventional sense, and that is deliberate. The book covers a single day aboard an orbiting space station — sixteen orbits, sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets — and its substance is the crew's routines, their memories of the lives they left behind, and the changing view of the planet below. A typhoon gathering over the Pacific is about as close as it comes to an external event. Readers who want narrative momentum should know it is a short, meditative book rather than a thriller.
Only loosely. It is set aboard the real International Space Station in the near present, with no invented technology and no speculative premise — Harvey researched actual spaceflight, and the book reads as realist literary fiction that happens to take place in orbit. That said, the science fiction community has claimed it: it was shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, which recognises imaginative writing.