"...Orbital offers us a love letter to our planet as well as a deeply moving acknowledgement of the individual and collective value of every human life." -- The Booker Prize Judges

"Luminous and profound, Orbital is hard to put down and even harder to forget." -- Booklist, Starred Review

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. 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. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Samantha Harvey is an English novelist. She won the 2024 Booker Prize for Orbital, which drew on conventions from multiple genres and fields, including literary fiction, science fiction, and philosophy. Her first novel, The Wilderness, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009, longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and won the 2009 Betty Trask Prize. Samantha has also been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award, the Women’s Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. She has completed postgraduate courses in philosophy and in Creative Writing, and is a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. In addition to writing, she has travelled extensively, she has taught in Japan and lived in Ireland and New Zealand. She recently co-founded an environmental charity and lives in Bath, England.