Orbital

Sixteen orbits of Earth in a single day. That is what six astronauts aboard the International Space Station do, watching as the planet turns beneath them — oceans and deserts and the flickering lights of cities, storms that look like flowers, the thin blue line of the atmosphere that separates everything living from the void.

At once intimate and immense, Orbital is a novel about what it means to be human when you are no longer quite on Earth: the mundane routines of life in space, the weight of homesickness, the strange beauty of seeing the world whole. Samantha Harvey's prose is luminous and precise — a meditation on time, on belonging, on the fragility of the world we rarely stop to look at.

Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize. One of the most extraordinary novels of its decade.