Orbital: Winner of the Booker Prize

Halfway through this extraordinary novel I had my doubts. After all, you could say that it’s all about going round and round in circles. But in the end Samantha Harvey very much more than justifies her Booker. There are writing gurus who swear that the fundamental secret, bar none, to all good writing is the sentence: get that key component right and you’re on a winning streak from the off. If that were all there was to it, even then Harvey would certainly be a winner. Her sentences are beautifully structured and sparkle and shimmer with wit, insight and feeling. She’s a born writer, but her novel goes way beyond the mere accomplished sentence. The centre of her book is the visionary experience of the Earth seen from space. Oh, the stars and the moon come into it too, but what concerns her are the six astronauts (well, four astronauts and two cosmonauts, Russians) in the space station two hundred and fifty miles above the planet. Orbital is a close, intimate recreation of twenty four hours in the lives of these two women and four men, confined in their cramped metal container as it spins through sixteen orbits, working its way over continents, islands, seas and deserts, while they experience sixteen sunsets and sixteen sunrises (a helpful map at the start shows you their detailed trajectory). They carry out their set routines of cleaning and maintaining the craft, performing the vital physical exercises to keep themselves trim in a weightless environment, and carrying out various scientific experiments. Chie, for example, the Japanese crew member, rejoices when the lab mice she’s supervising finally learn to float, instead of desperately trying to rely on non-existent gravity. Meanwhile, she grieves for her mother, back in Japan, who has just died. She recalls her favourite moments with her, but will miss the funeral. Other events outside impinge. They witness the build up of a super-typhoon in the Pacific, but beyond reporting back to mission control, are of course powerless to do anything about it. They enthusiastically follow the launch of a new Moon-landing expedition, not a little envious of their fellow astronauts. They fret about home and families, treasure the few mementoes mounted around each of their individual cramped sleeping quarters. But the centre of everything is what they see through the windows: ‘They don’t know how it can be that their view is so endlessly repetitive and yet each time, every single time, newly born.’ They experience ‘A sense of gratitude so overwhelming that there’d be nothing they could do with or about it, no word or thought that could be its equal…’ In the end, Harvey’s sense of the extraordinary adventure of orbiting in space, witnessing the marvel of the globe beneath you, widens out into an enthralling vision of mankind’s future explorations and the planetary wonders beyond Earth.

Contemporary writing at its best, elegant and beguiling. The novel handles big ideas about our planet without preaching.

Good book well written just not my thing. Writing is excellent and makes one ponder unfortunately just not the theme I love

I was completely captivated by this book, no plot, little description of the characters but this minimal writing lets our little blue planet hold the centre stage The contrast between the housekeeping on the space station - magnets to stop forks floating away - and the contemplation of our earth with seas, land, rivers and deserts but no visible national boundaries is ...stark. And the transition from practical matters to political / environmental ones is wonderfully made. I read over the summer and recommended to our Book Group - we all found it interesting, even those who expected a SciFi ( it's not). A beautiful book.

Read on Kindle - finished July 2025 This book is more like a painting. Samantha paints beautiful pictures using beautifully collected words in lovely sentences. It’s wonderfully written. There is a real sense of tumbling over and over. There is almost a cadence to the words and sentences. A bit like a very long poem. I would love to go up to space and see the pictures that she has painted. It would be amazing. I enjoyed the book because it was so beautifully written and loved the images it conjured up.

Samantha Harvey writes like a dream, and I feel it would be stingy to give her anything less than five stars for descriptions such as this: 'Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they [the astronauts] dream it stalking through their quarters.' Or this: 'Space shreds time to pieces. They [the astronauts] were told this in training: keep a tally each day when you wake, tell yourself this is the morning of a new day.' The concept of the novel is brilliant and Harvey must have punched the air when she she thought (or dreamed) it. But even she could feel uncertain as to whether she could fill in all the space between the structure of her very clever, orbiting idea. The parallel stories of the six characters (one, for instance, deeply in love, another disillusioned) and the reflections on the meaning of life started off well but seemed to lose momentum; and in the end I lost interest, and maybe the author did too. The descriptions of beautiful earth and our fragile human future come across so touchingly, but the ending feels like the story's creator ran out of fuel.

This book clearly required a lot of study of how the international space station works , its orbits and equipment, which I found interesting and informative. The language was elegant, very descriptive but in a poetic, mostly pleasant way (though it did feel, many times, like it was trying very hard to make every sentence deep and taking itself too seriously). The main message was simple and clear, although maybe a little too simple as it's exactly the kind of message you'd expect about how little the differences we see on earth matter when you're up in space. I didn't dislike the book or the characters, though they felt a little lifeless to me. Considering that you are kind of reading the characters' thoughts and reflections for most of the book, I was expecting to feel a little more from their introspection, but it really didn't go almost anywhere. There isn't really a story (I didn't expect it) or character development, as this book is more of a long exposure picture of a day in space, but I still thought there would be more to it. It was ok, but only that. I read it out of curiosity, but I don't think I'll ever read it again nor that I would have missed anything if I had skipped it entirely. I'm a little confused as to why this book won any prize or particular attention: it does what it says it will do, fairly elegantly, but nothing more than that, and considering the supposed warmth of the message I felt kind of cold and underwhelmed. It's a short book, but it took be a while to go through it: it wasn't exactly boring, but I never once felt any motivation to read one more chapter or even just one more page, as literally you'd get nothing more, no new perspective; it all felt the same thing repeated over and over till the end. I found it mildly disappointing.

More a long poem than a novel, what this book lacks is a plot. At only 136 pages, it was nevertheless a slow read, as the only discernible story line was the space station going around the earth 16 times, and the thin back-stories of the six astronauts/cosmonauts looking out the windows. And of the mice brought along for experiments. The real problem is the fact that Samantha Harvey has not traveled into space herself, and so every word in her book is based on books and films and pictures and descriptions we have all seen and read. This produces a kind of déjà vu/deja lu sensation. As an exercise in imagining, it becomes almost competititve – does she imagine it better than me? An admirable amount of geographical and technological learning has been compressed into this account – I only found one possible error, when she talks of “a vanishing mangrove forest in Mumbai” (since the mangrove forests are more likely to be a feature of the Bay of Bengal – Kolkata way). For the rest, while the topographical descriptions have a careful beauty, the sensation in reading them is an impatience to be getting on with the story – and there is no story, just a repetitious survey of the passing surface of the earth sliced into narrowly spaced parallel orbits, continents, countries, mountains, deserts, forests, rivers lakes and oceans. There are hints of possible story lines in the crack that appears in the fuselage of the space station, and the cherry-sized lump appearing on Anton’s neck, and the moon mission launched while the space station continues its orbits – but none of this is developed, it all recedes beneath the hum of Harvey’s beautiful but inconsequential language.