I have a confession to make. I am often not a fan of the big literary prize winners. With a few notable exceptions, they can feel dry, without much of a plot or characters that I can relate to. I know I will ruffle some feathers admitting this and of course everyone comes to their reading experience in a different way with their own expectations.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey was the 2024 Booker Prize winner and was a nominated read for my book group early this year, but I missed that meeting and my turn only just came up on the borrower’s list at my local library this month. But I had heard many positive things about this book and I was keen to try it and form my own view. Unlike many Booker winners, it is a slender book, a novella really, so I was not faced with one of those weighty tomes to wade through. I took a deep breath and began.

In some respects this one lives up to my previous experience of literary prize winners. Here’s how:

• There’s not really a ‘plot’ to speak of. The narrative takes place over a single day, following six astronauts in an international space station as they orbit sixteen times around the earth. Things happen, but they are not events that move the plot forward in the traditional sense of a novel.
• There’s not a lot of character development or movement either. We learn a little about each of the astronauts, who are from six different countries, and something of their lives before embarking on this mission. But that’s kind of it. No great emotional insight to speak of, no huge conflict (inner or interpersonal), no emotional arc over the book’s duration.
• The author has a tendency to say in many words, and sometimes very long sentences, what could perhaps be said in just a few.

Did I grow impatient and annoyed, as I would ordinarily do whilst reading a book like this? No, I did not. I know these characteristics have irritated some readers and I can understand why, but what stood out instead for me about Orbital were these features:

• Exquisite descriptive writing conjuring exactly what the view from a space module’s window must look like at various times of the ‘day’ and ‘night’.
• Startling insights into the regular routine of life on board. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have never considered, for example, that orbiting the earth like this means that the astronauts experience multiple sunrises and sunsets in one 24-hour period. Actually the human construct of time means very little in space. How do astronauts adapt to this?
  ‘The past comes, the future, the past, the future. It’s always now, it’s never now.’ p76
• Glimpses into the psyche of an astronaut. Either the author interviewed current or past astronauts or else has a vivid imagination and emotional intelligence; either way, she brings the inner world of her characters to life so that readers can understand a little of the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ of space travel: the competing demands of home and space, what feels real and what simply imagined.
• Fascinating facts about the humdrum and ordinary. How do people in space eat, sleep, wash, exercise, spend leisure time? What are their daily chores and responsibilities? How do you exist in such close confines for months at a time with a small group like that, with no outlet or way to be with others or to be truly alone?
• What is it like to do a spacewalk, outside the space station module? Terrifying? Electrifying? Like coming home? Perhaps all of these.

What I most enjoyed about Orbital, though, is the way the author puts into perspective our globe, our earth: our (so far at least) one-and-only home, and the way the astronauts’ feelings gradually change over time about it as they gaze down on it from above:

Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold…to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakenly home…Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It is not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend? Yet they hear the news and they’ve lived their lives and their hope does not make them naive.
Orbital p73

Orbital was published by Penguin Random House UK in 2024