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Orbital

Samantha Harvey

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5 stars

27,908 (19%)

4 stars

45,888 (32%)

3 stars

43,902 (30%)

2 stars

18,849 (13%)

1 star

5,921 (4%)

Displaying 1 - 30 of 24,929 reviews

John Caleb Grenn

310 reviews228 followers

August 16, 2025

Samantha Harvey, who I’m sure is very nice but also apparently became quite fascinated by the Wikipedia entry of Voyager, presents to us her Google Earth travelogue. Orbital is an essayistic file of recurring lists, rolls, catalogs, registers, indexes, directories and listings about various geography and other hobnob things noticed by a group of astronauts in orbit. Literally at one point she lists the Great Lakes. Like all 5. Just because. Full of less than profound musings, Harvey adds this awkward *literary sense of wonder* to professional astronauts that I imagine may would have been much more familiar with the humdrum STEM topics she seems to be utterly in awe of. Africa. Australia. Islands. The Antarctic. The ocean. The ocean. The ocean. The desert. Land. The land. The sun. The sun. The dark. The dark. Oops another list. Come here for surface-level musings about space and God and nature and stay for the lists and lists and more lists. And for that time she anthropomorphized the moon, saying it missed humans since we hadn’t gotten to visit in the last 50 years and when she quoted the same old story about time since the Big Bang comparing it to a calendar year and mentioning that humans haven’t been here all that long, just toward the end of December… wow did she just take Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar and present it as her own??? Is that even OKAY??? Then she goes and writes yet another list that’s her own boring version of We Didn’t Start the Fire where she mentions every blasted thing EXCEPT for Billy Joel. Contrived, trite, boring, and really just a bad book.

Adina ( back from Vacay…slowly recovering)

1,297 reviews5,564 followers

April 21, 2025

Winner of the Booker prize 2024.

Well, there is no doubt that the writing is beautiful. Did I enjoy reading the novel? Hmm, I am not sure. Mostly because I could not focus on it for more than 5 minutes at a time. I listened to the book and it might have been a bad decision, since the novel is plotless. Yes, there is absolutely no plot in it. It does not start from a point and goes to another. It might circle around like the space station orbits around Earth. Ok, there is no plot but there are words in the novel, what are they about, you might wonder? Me too, but I will try to write something about them. A bunch of astronauts from different countries are gathered together on a space station for 6 months and while they are there, they study the Earth, think and talk stuff. Sometimes about their childhood and what made them become astronauts. Sometimes about their family. Sometimes they wonder about the beauty of the earth. Sometimes they do science stuff, some involve genetically modified mice.

In conclusion, the book was beautifully written but boring (to me). I like space so it shouldn’t have been. It probably did not help that I was jet lagged while listening to it.

booker-2024

♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎

Author 1 book3,846 followers

August 14, 2025

What a puzzle of a book this was for me. If it had been exactly the same book and labeled "creative non-fiction" I would have been bowled-over-amazed by it. Its lack of plot would have been no impediment--because life doesn't come with a plot. To have been aware, as I read, that I was reading the meditations and wonderings of a real person in space would have been captivating.

But it's fiction. and I can't seem to give these fictional meditations, made by fictional people, the weight they deserve, without there also being a plot or some kind of forward momentum to give these fictional lives meaning.

I'm not sure this is a defensible position to take. Why the same words work as one thing, and not another. I'm reporting an actual subjective experience of reading this novel and being very aware it fails for me as fiction, and as some other thing it would have soared.

2023 a-new-way-of-reading booker

All My Friends Are Fictional

365 reviews47 followers

September 3, 2024

Orbital by Samantha Harvey is a frustrating read. The book is essentially threefold: one-third is dedicated to listing places, one-third to a romanticized portrayal of Russia and its people (while the rest of Eastern Europe remains just that—Eastern Europe, not deemed important enough), and one-third to trying too hard to sound intellectual.

The constant naming of locations feels more like a geography lesson than a narrative. Meanwhile, the idealization of Russia comes across as naive and disconnected from reality. Finally, the attempts at intellectual depth feel forced and pretentious, leaving the book feeling superficial and disjointed.

bad

Melissa ~ Bantering Books

372 reviews2,318 followers

September 12, 2024

2.5 stars

I would not have finished Orbital had it been more than 200 pages, because the book is so dry. And I expected more from it, seeing as it’s made the 2024 Booker Prize Longlist.

Samantha Harvey gives us a day in the life of six astronauts orbiting the earth in a space station. Two of the space explorers are from Russia, and the other four are from the United States, Italy, England, and Japan. So by all rights, the story should’ve been interesting. Six individuals from a variety of cultures living together in space – so much room for great storytelling.

But Harvey drops the ball. There’s no plot, no character development, no drama, no tension. Instead of focusing on the astronauts, earth is her main character. The book is 200 pages of endless descriptions of what earth looks like from space, and it was all I could do to even skim through it because it’s so boring. Harvey does throw in interesting snippets of the lives of the astronauts, of a secondary space mission to the moon, and of a brewing typhoon set to wreak mass destruction, but these passages are so few and so brief that it’s not enough to carry the book.

I’m sure others may find Orbital to be a worthwhile read, as there are some nice meditations on the interconnectedness of the world and mankind’s small place in it, and about how our beloved planet is both a source of great beauty and horrible devastation. But I just couldn’t connect with it, and it feels like such a missed opportunity.

My sincerest appreciation to Samantha Harvey, Atlantic Monthly Press, and NetGalley for the digital review copy. All opinions included herein are my own.

netgalley-arc on-my-kindle

s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all]

1,573 reviews15.1k followers

November 22, 2024

** WINNER of the 2024 Booker Prize **

I’ve long been in awe of the night sky, of laying back and losing oneself beneath a sky spattered with cosmic light. There is something comforting about being pulverized by the immensity of a sky vaster than even the wildest aspirations of first loves, to feel miniscule in the magnitude of the universe and find that what may feel momentous to your life at the time seems washed away in its enormity. This sense of awe permeates every page of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital chronicling 24 hours in the lives of six people aboard an international space station as it traverses the ‘ballroom of space’ around the planet. It is a quiet novel with little to call a “plot”—no wars erupt, the station is not visited by technological failures or extraterrestrial visitors which is just as well because ‘if you’re an astronaut you’d rather not ever be news. ’ This lack of narrative tension is hardly missed in the sheer beauty of Harvey’s prose that makes it practically a ponderous poem of a novel as we orbit perspectives into each character’s reflections as they in turn orbit the Earth as ‘humans with a godly view and that’s the blessing and also the curse.’ Occasionally tedious though breathtaking in its delivery, Orbital moves through philosophical and heartfelt investigations into ideas of perspective and the wonder of our fragile existence caught up in both self-destruction and discovery spinning on a tiny, living orb in the vastness of the universe.

‘The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.’

Harvey’s Orbital is an achievement in packaging a long litany of human aspirations and struggles, desires and damage into the tiny window of its pages. It is less a narrative than a gaze back at the Earth along with the astronauts with a prose to harness their awestruck reverence for the planet while also a reminder to just be, to observe, to not need narrative or structure and still be able to learn from what is around us. In a recent interview with NPR, Harvey recalled collecting quotes from astronauts as a child, such as one from a Russian cosmonaut about how he never truly understood the word “round” until looking at the Earth from orbit. ‘There's a sense of one's senses and one's perception being redefined by being in space,’ she explains, ‘it's not just that things have a certain clarity, but our terms of reference are redefined,’ and the impetus for Orbital was to construct a book about observing the Earth from above in the ways nature writing looks at birds and landscapes. Perception winds its way through the book as a central theme as each character finds themselves mulling over their lives and now distant homes from orbit. Harvey gracefully ropes in the famous photograph by astronaut Michael Collins of the Apollo 11 lunar lander drifting in front of the earth and moon.

‘Every single other person currently in existence, to mankind’s knowledge,’ Harvey writes of the photograph, ‘is contained in that image; only one is missing, he who made the image.’ Such is the nature of the astronauts reflections on the planet as they weigh their own lives and achievements against the world, which Harvey best addresses through a brief discourse on Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas.

Who is the subject of the painting, the king and queen seen only in reflection, the little girl at the center, the painter staring back at the audience, or, perhaps, are we the subject simply by gazing. It is a perfect example of the philosophical and emotional states of each of these characters.

‘Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once…Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach the pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything.’

The nature of their stay and how ‘space shreds time to pieces’ further impacts the ideas on perspectives, such as how they are told to awake each day and definitively tell themselves it is a new day despite each 24 hour cycle making them witness to 16 sunrises and sunsets through their orbits. ‘Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters,’ and each is affected by their journey, missing home, missing the funeral of a loved one, missing family, feeling lonely even when surrounded in close quarters by their newfound ‘floating family’ although ‘in some ways they’re not really a family at all – they’re both much more and much less than that.’ It is an honor to be there, though also quite the emotionally arduous honor to bear:

‘Up here, nice feels such an alien word. It’s brutal, inhuman, overwhelming, lonely, extraordinary and magnificent. There isn’t one single thing that is nice.’

While speaking with The Guardian, Harvey mentions Virginia Woolf as a major influence (she is often compared to Woolf in the press) and while she hadn’t had The Waves in mind while writing Orbital, she now sees the parallels and ‘the way voices surface and dissipate. Of The Waves, Woolf wrote to her friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson that‘the six characters were supposed to be one,’ six facets of consciousness, and in many ways we can view Harvey’s six orbiting characters in a similar fashion. Harvey sways us through each other their thoughts as they deal with the passing of time, writing lists of of irritating or reassuring things from earth, discussing what they miss, questioning how one could see the Earth from orbit and believe in a God while another questions how one could not believe, while filtering it through with other brief perspectives such as ancient seafarers for whom the ocean was not unlike space. Not much happens beyond the pristine prose instilling you with awe, making it akin to Becky Chambers’s To Be Taught if Fortunate (though with less plot and no dramatic conclusion) and even if it feels overly long for a short novel, that acknowledgement of the lethargy puts you in the mindset of the astronauts for whom time now feels unsteady.

‘What can we do in our abandoned solitude but gaze at ourselves? Examine ourselves in endless bouts of fascinated distraction, fall in love and in hate with ourselves, make a theatre, myth and cult of ourselves. Because what else is there?’

There is a sense of hope and togetherness in Orbital which contrasts with the dread of the planet below ransacked and razed from the ‘politics of growing and getting.’ Though what use are international tensions and politics for a crew that must drink each others recycled urine regardless of nation, race or creed? Still, the terrors of violence from wars, greed, climate crisis are more are felt even if distant from space.

‘Maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn’t ask to be alive, we didn’t ask to inherit an earth to look after, and we didn’t ask to be so completely and unjustly darkly alone.’

Even from above we must all confront the harsh reality that ‘wherever mankind goes it leaves some kind of destruction behind it.’ The earth is our home and ‘we couldn’t survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea.’ Yet there is also the lingering awareness of the space station and its crew as symbolic of human achievement, of our endless striving for survival, able to carry on even once we’ve destroyed the planet. It calls to mind the poem This World is Not Conclusion from Emily Dickinson that begins:

This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond -
Invisible, as Music -
But positive, as Sound -

If anything, that is the large hope to be garnered from Orbital, though it is also the tiny hopes—the appreciation for the small lights seen from space, the awareness of loved ones amidst the landscape, the rug one will buy upon return—that add up to something greater than its parts.

‘We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summery burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast.’

A short novel that takes its time slowly orbiting your thoughts along with the crew, Orbital by Samantha Harvey is devastatingly gorgeous in its prose and profundity. Engaging in its delivery even though its sustained instillation of awe can become a bit cumbersome as a novel, Orbital puts the reader right alongside the astronauts to gaze at our planet and wonder what we would think of ourselves were we to gaze back. Moving and poetically brilliant, this was quite the lovely read that will make you feel both great and small all at once.

3.5/5

‘How are we writing the future of humanity? We’re not writing anything, it's writing us. We’re windblown leaves. We think we’re the wind but we’re just the leaf.’

booker_finalist novella space

Anna

182 reviews8 followers

November 25, 2024

Ця книжка виявилась романтизацією всього російського я ригаю

My comment suddenly became a popular one, so I feel like I need to explain.

This is literally a romanticization of russian culture. It's clear as day that the author wanted to write about russians and love all russian very much. She could have at least hidden it and written about the astronauts' home countries equally. But she talks like 20% of the time about other nations and 80% about russia. And she knows so many details about that fucking country and how they live, how they speak. And to write this in 2024 when russia is committing literal genocide and killing civilians every day is completely tone-deaf. The lives of the people of an East-European country don't have a lot of value for the Westerns, huh?

Aside from that the book itself is not good. The sentences are short and repetitive. No plot at all. The characters are literally the same. They don't have personalities except some longing for the countries where they were born. It's definitely not science fiction as the author is too uneducated on space and space travel. The author didn't learn geography at school and it shows. And it's definitely just a bad fiction.

Kinga

533 reviews2,725 followers

April 9, 2024

No plot, just vibes.
Assorted shower thoughts.
Some sentences are beautiful and some turn out to be devoid of any meaning upon closer inspection.

batfell pub-2023

Olha Dakota

160 reviews19 followers

November 13, 2024

русофільська графоманія
В 2024 це маргінез - восхваляти русню, позорище

Sarah

1,025 reviews265 followers

September 1, 2024

If asked to describe this book in one word, it would be: nothingburgers.

It gave me nothing. It meant nothing. It was about nothing.

Actual quote from the book:

“The moon, the moon. Mars, the moon.”

I actually laughed, out loud, at how nonsensical this one is in places.

My experience of reading this was tantamount to being invited to lunch with some acquaintances. They aren’t friends really, but they could be, because they are generally nice people, so I agree to go (not really, because I’m an introvert, but for the purpose of this comparison, I go.) They select some restaurant I’ve never heard of where they serve you poutine with cashew cheese (I’ve had this, it’s gross). And while you’re eating some hipster stands up at the small stage with the microphone in front of the windows, and proudly announces they are about to have a slam poetry reading.

And then someone with the thickest, blackest eyeliner you’ve ever seen gets up and reads you their deepest poetry about #astronautlife, even though they have clearly never ever been to space.

And you can tell it really means something to them. And the audience is feeling it. And the poet is feeling it. And all you can do is make an excuse to run to the bathroom so you don’t burst into a laughing fit because it’s so fucking ridiculous.

So I am once again, the odd man out.

This is why I have no friends by the way.

Anyway. I gave it two stars because there was exactly one chapter about Chie’s mother that I found really beautiful and touching. It’s a fucking shame Harvey didn’t focus on the astronauts more because she did have something to say about the human condition, (outside of: in the majesty of space, human life is insignificant or humans are only a “few flint strikes ahead” of anything else), but it was so fleeting I can’t give it more than that. She should just write poetry if that’s what she wants to do. There are people who would appreciate it. She should not sell it in novel form. I am unlikely to read from this author again.

rec-sites sci-fi short-fiction

BJ Lillis

340 reviews290 followers

August 8, 2023

Orbital is a slender literary meditation on a crew of astronauts orbiting the earth. The very fact that it is not science fiction is itself miraculous and implausible. Humanity is in space. That we are in space is not a story about space—it is a story about Earth.

The writing is gorgeous. The novel—if you can call it that—is essentially an obsessive circling around the view of Earth from space. Hold it in your mind, the book demands, this miraculous planet. There is not much character development, no real conflict, little in the way of plot. Just this obsessive circling, an effort to grasp something intangible in the specifics of space travel. To take the knowledge that humans have left earth and repeat it like a mantra; to embellish it with tiny images, like an illuminated manuscript—do these intricate illuminations say more or less than the words they honor, or do they speak together in one voice? Hold them in your mind.

From this particular image, or infinite sequence of images—the earth from orbit—arises a more general interest in images: meditations on Velázquez’s La Meninas, on photographs of Earth taken from the moon. Does a change in perspective change anything? Or is it just human folly and hubris to think that by changing our view of the Earth we change the planet itself?

arcs

Alastair Tanner

1 review5 followers

January 14, 2025

I'll start with how clumsy the writing is. The author tries to use iteration as metaphor of orbit, but the execution is overwrought and patronising. Repetition quickly becomes tiresome, the reader forced to endure lists using "and" instead of commas, superfluously poetic vocabulary, and hamfistedly hammered infantile rhymes (yes, irony). Sentences often contain redundancies and tautologies (yes, irony!); both the author and her editor have a weak understanding of flow. Clichés are strewn so widely that it is comical - especially in the cringe-storm of Hollywood dialogue. The crew characterisation extends this movie-aesthetic, with stereotyping liberally daubed (bordering on racism regarding the Russians). Speech-marks and commas are jettisoned, when minimalist punctuation attending flabby prose is like putting ballet slippers on a walrus. The author conceitedly mistakes herself for a literary gazelle.

But there are two worse problems.

Firstly, the inner-worlds of the astronauts are not plausible. Those working in space are professionals, among the most highly trained people in history. They are mercilessly vetted to be pragmatic, stoic, reliable. Poets and dreamers need not apply. Anyone who can't deal with emotional strain while in orbit, doesn't pass. (Also, astronauts would need to report potential strains prior to missions - to not puts lives and billions of dollars of equipment at risk.) The crew are painted as sentimental and witless, and as such, are utterly implausible. When the core of a plotless book is inner-worlds, they better be good. To be good, they must first be realistic.

Secondly, the author is trying to write rigid, hard science fiction, but demonstrates poor technical insight (and weak research skills to correct this). Characters are constantly musing at windows as if this is Star Trek, when they are on the ISS - a cramped space where the few windows are liabilities, not lifestyle choices. Inexplicably there is an MRI machine on board... let me look that up: apparatus of typically 10 tons, with a monthly requirement of hundreds of litres of liquid helium cooled to 4 Kelvin, and god knows how much electric power (the smallest ever made, at 700 kg, can scan something the size of a chubby hamster). So anyway, not equipment you'll find in orbit any time soon. The book is trying so hard to be po-faced factual, but to anyone with scientific literacy it is laughably clear that the author is just a bit basic on that front. Combine this with the stylistic incompetence and it is hard to find a reason for this book to exist.

I would say more, but this was a DNF on page 16. However, in closing I will say that this book was inspiring, for the wrong reason: if an author so deaf to cliché, so adolescent in style, and so negligent to research can get published (and positively reviewed by you cretins on GoodReads!), so can I.

Give me around five years. See you then.

Post script, a few months later (late 2024), after this wins the Booker:

You know, I think it is deliberate trolling from the Booker panel.

Mere days before deciding on their winner, the most inappropriate, incompetent and repulsive person alive on Earth was given the most powerful job on Earth.

How they chortled, sitting around the hallowed deliberation table --where in yesteryear cultural titans like Ishiguro and Rushdie, Murdoch and Atwood were debated and admired.

"Well, I think it is time to show the world that we have a sense of humour too!" A rustle of giggles.

"By declaring this anaemic, clumsy, cultural puddle Harvey the winner!"

An explosion of guffaws, they rise and roar: "The beautiful irony! As the world writhes in its death spasm, we willingly stumble into the flames! By stabbing literary culture dead, dead, DEAD -- an act of performance art that nobody will forget!"

Meanwhile, six thousand miles away, the nuclear codes are being handed to an unstable, vengeful, barely-sentient fascist.

Hannah Greendale (Hello, Bookworm)

814 reviews4,223 followers

June 11, 2025

A starlit elegy to planet earth. 🌎

Want to see my Top Reads of 2023 on BookTube? Come find me at Hello, Bookworm.📚🐛

"Sometimes they look at the earth and could be tempted to roll back all they know to be true, and to believe instead that it sits, this planet, at the centre of everything."

Small but mighty! A stunning meditation on our wondrous planet earth.

This book gives account of just one day in the lives of six astronauts who are orbiting the earth. Samantha Harvey allows us glimpses of their daily lives as well as quiet, reflective moments on their personal lives. But the greatest moments this book has to offer come in the form of lyrical descriptions of the view outside the astronauts' window.

Orbital is not a book to rush through. It's one that demands to be read slowly, consumed in small bites. Even then, it will be over soon, but its wondrous offerings will be savored long after.

adult best-of-the-year booker-prize-nominee

Zsa Zsa

777 reviews96 followers

October 2, 2024

Who is nominating these books for awards without obviously reading them?

Nataliya

987 reviews16.2k followers

October 6, 2024

It seems that to turn a narrative set on the International Space Station — in low Earth orbit, with six people in a few tiny modules surrounded by cables and Velcro and darkness and stars and immense yet tiny planet Earth below — into literary fiction it takes removing the plot and leaving just inner dreamlike monologues and musings unable to escape the pull of Earth and humanity. It’s about our human earthly troubles, loneliness, connections, very contemplative and reflective and ultimately hopeful.

“Hello, are you there? Hello?”

Stripped of plot, this is really a very long essay that could have just gone on and on, as the lack of narrative structure other than dividing the book into multiple orbits of Earth over a day does not call for any ending or closure or a stopping point. Usually I’d have my eyes glaze over when confronted with such slow and dreamlike rumination on humanity, but I suppose the periodic injections of space station routines (bagging up waste to burn up in space? muscle atrophy from microgravity? Velcro-ing chopsticks to the table?) made my attention perk up, helping to refocus. I’m just nerdy that way. (Maybe that’s what Kafka needed to get my attention - a spacesuit).

“Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It’s the desire – no, the need (fuelled by fervour) – 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 unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It’s 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. So what do they do? What action to take? And what use are words? They’re humans with a godly view and that’s the blessing and also the curse.”

(Of course I immediately subscribed to YouTube NASA channel. And viewed live feed of Earth from ISS. Seriously, that’s hypnotic).

Borders are (mostly) invisible from space, and we are all passengers on this tiny blue dot which we cannot leave fully, ever. It’s all a matter of perspective, and it’s humbling realizing your insignificance in the light of something immensely and overwhelmingly amazing. “They’re humans with a godly view,” indeed.

“Some alien civilisation might look on and ask: what are they doing here? Why do they go nowhere but round and round? The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.”

And yet this book is a bit long for its short length, in its slow movement through 16 Earth orbits in a day, and like that “godly view” it’s both a blessing and a curse. As much fun as an extra-long contemplative meditation can be, at some point the need arises for something focused somewhere else, something outside the space inside the six crewpersons’ heads (and maybe do something, anything, to help me connect with any of them just a little bit), and something to make time pass in a way that seems more real and less obsessively nebulous, even if the writing is quite lovely.

“The surprising thought occurs to them sometimes: they are encapsulated, a submarine moving alone through the vacuum depths, and when they leave it they will feel less safe. They will reappear on the earth’s surface as strangers of a kind. Aliens learning a mad new world.”

3.5 stars. I’m glad space stuff is coming into the literary fiction world, even if it’s just a framework for now.

——————

Also posted on my blog.

2024-reads

emma

2,586 reviews93.3k followers

Want to read

December 1, 2024

i never feel smarter than when i'm reading award winners

library literary-fiction non-ya

Taufiq Yves

509 reviews345 followers

December 9, 2024

The winner of the 2024 Booker Prize has been announced, and it is Orbital by the female writer Samantha Harvey. From the title and cover, it's easy to guess that this is a book about space, the universe, or astronauts.

Let's start with the reading difficulty. The book is quite thin because the main plot revolves around a single day in the life of 6 astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS). Throughout this day, the ISS orbits the Earth 16 times, and each chapter of the book details these 16 orbits. Since the book contains a lot of aerospace - related technical terms, and we know astronauts conduct various experiments in space - biology, chemistry, medicine, physics, and more - there are many specialized terms in these fields as well. If you have a strong vocabulary in these areas, the reading difficulty is manageable. If not, you will need to be patient.

I am very curious about the work of astronauts. I often wonder about their state of being in space, what they talk about, what they do, and whether their worldviews differ significantly from those on Earth since they have the "God's eye view." This book perfectly satisfies my curiosity about space travel. Its subject matter and perspective are highly intriguing to me. What I appreciate most is that the book’s plot does not include typical science fiction or other novel elements, such as encounters with aliens or significant accidents.

The plot of this novel is very routine, without dramatic twists and turns or mind - bending settings. It mainly details the daily lives of the 6 astronauts in space, including their meals, living conditions, and individual psychological activities. This is exactly what I wanted to see. The most fluctuating part of the book is the psychological activities of each astronaut. Although the degree and details of their psychological activities differ, they mainly reflect on their lives on Earth and reconsider those memories while in space. Those of us who have flown internationally may have experienced this to some extent. At higher altitudes, the people and buildings on the ground disappear, and even the invisible borders between countries vanish from our minds, leaving only a complete world, a unified Earth. All emotions experienced in life, work, friendships, family, and conflicts tend to calm down. It’s like how, after the water flows out of a gold panner's pan, the sand and gold grains clearly reveal themselves. This feeling is even more pronounced over 400 kilometers above Earth in outer space. This is the greatest resonance I felt with the plot of the book.

The New York Times review of this book, as well as reports from various media about its award, used similar descriptions: Harvey writes in a poetic or lyrical language. This is very accurate. Her proficiency in using the English language is high, allowing me to appreciate her linguistic talent. As this book is about the astronauts' daily lives, Harvey’s ability to write mundane daily life in such poetic and lyrical language is impressive. While reading, I found many great quotes. I won't quote them here, but if you are interested, you can read the book yourself. Orbital is still relatively new, and the points that resonate and touch each reader's soul might differ. I don't want my personal preferences to influence anyone who are initially interested in this book.

The astronauts in this book are on the International Space Station, so there are no astronauts from China, as they are on their own space station. Often watching news about Chinese astronauts and their space station, I felt a strange sense of familiarity while reading this book. When the book describes the astronauts' living environments and the various experiments they conduct, I can accurately imagine the environment and objects on the space station. This feeling is quite magical.

4 / 5 stars

english

Meike

Author 1 book5,084 followers

March 6, 2025

Now Nominated for the Translation Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair 2025
Winner of the Booker Prize 2024
This is not for me, but I can see how it is an original, innovative and lyrically crafted meditation on the beauty of earth, and how it could all be lost. Harvey takes the perspectives of four astronauts and two cosmonauts who are looking down from a space shuttle in which they orbit our planet sixteeen times over the span of 24 hours. Don't bother to ask for a plot, there is none (I share the sentiment that plot is overrated, btw). The sentences are moody and ruminative, describing and pondering oceans and land masses while adding extensive philosophical musings. There are also some backstories for the individual space travelers, but they do not meaningfully contribute to the overall artistic vision.

The focus here is the view on earth from above, the ideas and sentiments that emerge due to this new perspective and that are captured by both the characters and the omniscient narrator who adds poetic, spiritual layers. "Orbital" is meandering, meditative, and has some moral undertones hammering home the obvious, so it's everything I don't want my literature to be. But Harvey herself refers to it as a "space pastoral", so for what it aims to be, it's very well done, never pretentious, and it offers some beautiful sentences with a strong atmospheric quality (see what I did there? ;-)). So you do you, Samantha Harvey, I respect your artistic decisions.

2024-booker uk

Candi

709 reviews5,537 followers

October 12, 2024

“The mind is in a dayless freak zone, surfing earth’s hurtling horizon. Day is here, and then they see night come upon them like the shadow of a cloud racing over a wheat field. Forty-five minutes later here comes day again, stampeding across the Pacific. Nothing is what they thought it was.”

This beautifully written novel about six men and women orbiting earth for nine months confirmed how I feel daily – that conflicting sense that in the grand scheme of things, I matter not at all and also very much. If you’re looking for a space adventure filled with tension, science and action, then this book won’t satisfy you on those terms. What Samantha Harvey has penned is cerebral and contemplative. Despite the speed at which these characters orbit earth (sixteen orbits in one day), the pace of the book is quite slow. It’s a slim book that made me slow down my reading so I could reflect on my own thoughts, my own purpose. The reverence held by these astronauts and cosmonauts for the earth is palpable and sublimely illustrated through Harvey’s prose. It sometimes veers towards the sensual, which I liked.

“You could never really comprehend the stars, but the earth you could know in the way you know another person, in the way he came quite studiedly and determinedly to know his wife. With a yearning that’s hungry and selfish. He wishes to know it, inch by inch.”

We spend a small amount of time with each of these characters. We view the mundaneness of their daily orbiting lives. We learn of the effects of microgravity on their bodies, the psychological effects of viewing their home planet from above and the infinite vastness of outer space from their spacecraft windows. Their backgrounds are revealed to us. We catch glimpses of their relationships on earth, how they are coping with being away from family. We understand a bit about their relationships with one another. Harvey doesn’t preach to the reader about the existence or non-existence of a God or some higher being. She does show us, however, through a couple of her characters at least, how views differ about the idea of creation.

“She’d point out of the port and starboard windows where the darkness is endless and ferocious. Where solar systems and galaxies are violently scattered… Look, she’d say. What made that but some heedless hurling beautiful force? And he would point… and he would say: what made that but some heedful hurling beautiful force? Is that all the difference there is between their views, then – a bit of heed?... The difference seems both trivial and insurmountable.”

Despite the obvious limitations and costs, perhaps if every single person on this planet (or maybe our world leaders for a start) could be launched into space for a several month orbit of the earth, more people would come away realizing the hubris of their vanities, desires and greed. The reliance on one another for survival and companionship, despite nationalities and belief systems, might convince a few of them, at least, that this is in essence, all about humanity. Man-made borders do not exist from space, and to survive on this planet governed by the violent forces of nature, this planet that is just a minuscule part, a tiny “dot” existing within an entire universe, one might truly grasp the truth that this is not an “us versus them” scenario. We might realize this on an intellectual level, but for some reason it seems to stay in the head and not truly felt. I suppose experience is the best teacher.

“You’ll see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, yet alone war. And you’ll feel yourself pulled in two directions at once. Exhilaration, anxiety, rapture, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair. Because of course you know that war abounds and that borders are something that people will kill and die for.”

I truly admired this book for the way it made me think. Not that these are completely original ideas. I’ve thought about our tiny planet in the grand scheme of things. I’ve considered my own place and purpose and usefulness plenty of times. Having this kind of reminder and absorbing the beauty of Samantha Harvey’s writing craft doesn’t hurt though. One thing I felt lacking was a fully realized connection to any of the characters. Harvey managed to convey her ideas through them effectively, yet I found them to be simply that – vehicles for these ideas. Ideas that I fully respect and agree with, but just the same I would have loved this even more had I been shown more depth of her characters. Perhaps the length of the novel had something to do with this. In only 200 pages, one can’t share the intellectual ideas and develop six main characters to the extent that I crave. That’s not a criticism but a personal preference. I still highly recommend this novel to anyone that loves to meditate about his or her place on this planet. Or anyone that thinks they are above all that – but those vain creatures won’t touch a book like this with a ten-foot pole!

“And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.”

literary-fiction

Jennifer Minikowski

178 reviews5 followers

May 30, 2024

Oh my gosh I finally finished this. If I could give it 0 stars I would. I want to never return this book to the library, pay the fine, and burn this book so no one has to suffer like I did. This book could have been 1 chapter or simply saying look at Google Earth. There was literally no plot to this book and took place over the course of a day. If she wanted to inform us about space, how about do it in a less mind-numbing way? The typhoon happening on Earth was more interesting than the 6 people in space. Also, I don’t not finish books, hence suffering through the entire thing.

Orsodimondo

2,469 reviews2,442 followers

October 21, 2025

GRAVITY

Leggo che Samantha Harvey vive a Bath, città che mi fa subito pensare a Peter Gabriel e agli studi della sua Real World: eppure questo romanzo risuona come se lei fosse laureata in astronomia e avesse lavorato tutta la vita per la NASA. Lavoro di documentazione pazzesco (o è solo la mia ignoranza della materia?).
Ne è venuto fuori un romanzo breve, senza trama e senza che nulla accada, per certi versi ripetitivo. Ma a tratti e nel suo insieme, per usare le parole con cui Harvey descrive la vita in orbita terrestre: è brutale, disumano, opprimente, solitario, straordinario e magnifico.
Ma non piacevole, aggiunge. Che è da riferirsi al percorrere un’orbita terrestre.
Ma anche per quanto riguarda il suo breve libro, piacevole non è il termine giusto: è un’orgia di colori, una tavolozza ricca e luminosa, una festa di luce e luci e buio, un fuoco d’artificio di sensazioni. Mai immaginato che la Terra fosse così bella! E Samantha Harvey qui ci regala un canto alla Terra, un’ode (elegia?) al pianeta che ci ospita (e che stiamo devastando)

Alla velocità di ventisettemila chilometri all’ora, la stazione spaziale orbita intorno alla Terra sedici volte ogni giorno, ogni ventiquattro ore. Il tempo si trasforma, un’ora spaziale diventa quattro volte quattro terrestri. Un giorno ogni novanta minuti. I sei astronauti continuano ad ancorarsi al tempo del nostro pianeta, dividendo la giornata secondo gli orari consolidati: colazione, pranzo, cena, dormire… Sedici albe e sedici tramonti nell’arco di ventiquattro ore.
Una inglese, un americano, un italiano, una giapponese, e due russi: proprio come nelle barzellette d’antan.
Nonostante la velocità del viaggio, l’assenza di gravità e lo sguardo di Samantha Harvey privilegiano la lentezza. Un esempio per tutti: il formarsi e in seguito il deflagrare del tifone sulle Filippine.
Lo spazio è infinito, i sei astronauti, e noi tutti terrestri, siamo ben più limitati, e fragili.
La vista fuori dagli oblò è da piangere tutto il tempo impotente di fronte alla nuda bellezza della Terra.
Stupore, sorpresa, paura, soggezione… I deserti color albicocca, l’isola rosa nella luce del mattino, l’Asia tutta ingioiellata dalle luci notturne, mare verde pallido sfocato e luccicante, sfocata terra color mandarino.

Nello spazio … raccogli un po’ di detriti, frammenti di veicoli esplosi o scartati, decine di migliaia; ovunque l’umanità vada si lascia dietro una scia di distruzione, in un modo o nell’altro, forse perché è la natura stessa della vita.
Trasformiamo in discarica anche lo spazio, oltre che i poli e i ghiacciai, il mare, i fiumi, le nostre città.

Nello spazio, nell’assenza di gravità anche il corpo umano si trasforma in un’entità sconosciuta. Sempre che la si conosca quando siamo con i piedi ben piantati sulla sfera terrestre.
Nel blu dipinto di blu.

inglese

Tim

2,521 reviews330 followers

March 11, 2024

Made it halfway through before throwing in the towel. dnf

lidenbrokk

6 reviews4 followers

November 13, 2024

Це не повинно існувати

L.A.

72 reviews14 followers

January 2, 2025

This novel is an effigy of human experience; impersonal, phony, and significant only to its creator. Except that effigies are based upon specific people, with their own personalities, histories, prerogatives, and coping mechanisms; and this novel all amalgam and zero meat.

This novel gives cosmic significance to every basic-bitch feeling and feckless thought. It is so vague and impersonal it should have been written in 2nd-person (no offense to 2nd-person, since great writers like Justin Torres can pull this off with authentic, distinct personal experience. But that would require a provincial perspective rather than a world-aggrandizing angle). It’s like AI was given the task of creating a novel based on Wikipedia articles of the international space station, The Challenger, Winnie the Pooh, and typhoons. But hey, that AI writes pretty sentences!

Faith

2,243 reviews682 followers

December 3, 2023

“Six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft contemplating the world below.” That blurb really says it all. This book was not for me. I kept going only because it was short. Unfortunately, it was also completely plotless and uneventful. Just musings about the planet and the former lives of the astronauts. I was very bored, and so glad when they finally reached the 16th orbit. I would not read this author again. I received a free copy of this audiobook from the publisher.

audio netgalley reviewed

Maxwell

1,449 reviews12.5k followers

December 21, 2024

Updated Review:
I don't know whether it's my headspace or just the fact of reading this from a perspective of someone who has read it before, but this was so much better the 2nd time around! Obviously she is a fantastic writer, but the structure and themes of the novel tied together much more for me on a re-read, and it really connected with me on a more emotional level than I anticipated. I think this is a book I could see myself revisiting every few years; it offers a good perspective on life and doesn't give straight answers but instead gives you dozens of little moments of reflection to consider. It's a book you can take your time with or read in one big gulp and take something different away from it each time, which I appreciate. This is why I love re-reading!!

Original Review: 3 stars
Samantha Harvey's Orbital offers a unique perspective on Earth as it follows six astronauts over the course of tweny-four hours as they complete sixteen orbits of earth—one every 90 minutes.

The novel's portrayal of our planet from afar is breathtaking and meditative. Harvey manages to capture a sense of wonder over the smallness of life in contrast with the vastness of space that resonates throughout the narrative. However, as the book progresses, I found some of these descriptions beginning to feel somewhat repetitive, losing some of their initial impact.

The characters in Orbital are intriguing but remain at a distance, almost like they are orbiting the story rather than grounding it. We get glimpses into their lives that hint at deeper layers, and while it seems intentional to keep them somewhat remote, as a reader who prefers more character-driven narratives, I found myself wanting more depth and connection with them.

Harvey's writing is undeniably skillful, and the novel reads almost like philosophical poetry in its contemplations on existence, life forms, and the universe. Her reflections are thought-provoking and beautifully written, making the novel more about the experience of reading her prose than about the story itself.

Overall, I appreciated Orbital for its meditative quality and the sheer skill with which Harvey writes. However, I found myself more impressed by the craft than emotionally invested in the narrative.

Henk

1,210 reviews332 followers

November 26, 2024

Winner of the 2024 Booker prize! 🏆🪐🚀🌎
It is easy to grow jaded about our technological progress but this book shows how incredible the lives of a select few astronauts are, experimenting in orbit around our planet, while rapidly spinning in a pattern similar to Murano glass across the continents. Unfortunately I actually fell asleep while reading this book
The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

In a lyrical manner, and through the perspective of 6 astronauts and cosmonauts Samantha Harvey brings the wonders of the International Space Station to life. While the writing is pretty, and the concept of zooming into what space travel anno 2024 actually means is interesting on a theoretical level, I was left rather unimpressed.

Orbital is not a propulsive (pun intended) novel and I literally fell asleep one time while reading, even though I really love astronomy and space. The novel is basically plotless, focussing on reflections by the astronauts we follow for a day, and who we don't get to know overly deeply or intimately enough to really care for them. The Japanese astronaut who lost her mother is the closest I got to an emotional connection, while the astronaut who sees a typhoon and thinks of his honeymoon and how he met a fisher family in the Philippines was rather trite in my opinion. Maybe Harvey recognises this herself as well: But there are no new thoughts. They’re just old thoughts born into new moments.

Auroras, hurricanes, fjords, the Pyramids and many cities pass their portholes, but the medium of a book is maybe not the most effective manner to convey this visual splendour of our planet. The lack of gravity and the discipline to sustain a human body despite this, the packaged food and the closed up space with all time regimented to maximise observations and experiments, makes clear it is far from a glamorous life to be an astronaut. Still you can definitely see the allure of being a space tourist.

One plot line, if we can call it that way, is that in Orbital the ISS astronauts are not even the furthest away people from earth, with a Moon mission just departed from Cape Canaveral, bringing the point of expanding the human frontier further home. Finally I wanted to note that while I started this novel I was undergoing treatment for an illness and I did found that the isolation of a space station is an apt metaphor for sickness.
Still I am a bit surprised I didn't like this book more, but I am rounding up my 2.5 stars, based on the quality of the writing.
A surprising winner in my view, despite me definitely having warmed to Harvey during her shortlist readings.

Quotes:
Space shreds time to pieces.

Four inches of titanium away from death. Not just death, obliterated non-existence.

... wherever mankind goes it leaves some kind of destruction behind it, perhaps the nature of all life, to do this.

A human being was not made to stand still.

How are we writing the future of humanity?
We’re not writing anything, its writing us. We’re windblown leaves. We think we’re the wind but we’re just the leaf.

Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach the pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything.

2024 Booker prize personal ranking, shortlisted books in bold:
1. Held (4.5*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
2. Playground (4.5*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
3. James (4*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
4. Wandering Stars (4*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
5. Headshot (3.5*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
6. The Safekeep (3.5*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
7. My Friends (3.5*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
8. Stone Yard Devotional (3.5*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
9. This Strange and Eventful History (3*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
10. Creation Lake (3*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
11. Enlightenment (3*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
12. Orbital (2.5*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
13. Wild Houses (2.5*) - Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

owned

Jonas

343 reviews11 followers

March 10, 2025

Orbital is more than a moment in time novel. Orbital offers a poetic perspective of Earth and humanity. Four astronauts and two cosmonauts serving aboard the space station are living their dream, vicariously experiencing the dreams of others as they embark on the next moon landing, and witnessing the nightmare Mother Nature has in store for the Philippines. Stories are shared. Tasks competed. Bonds are made. At times philosophical, others observational, but above all memorable.

booker

Darryl Suite

720 reviews827 followers

August 17, 2024

Love love love love love love. Oh, my love. Sitting here astonished.

The prose reminded me of Virginia Woolf. Don’t ask me why I felt that, I just did. This book is gorgeous, totally breathtaking. A spatial meditative and metaphysical odyssey. Using the backdrop of space and astronomy to explore down-to-earth human behaviors and experiences. Very unique to have your novel set in space yet mostly talk about what it’s like to be on Earth.

I was truly in awe of this thing. FULL REVIEW TO COME.

“Maybe human civilization is like a single life — we grow out of the royalty of childhood into supreme normality; we find out about our own unspecialness and in a flush of innocence we feel quite glad — if we're not special then we might not be alone.”

leah

526 reviews3,424 followers

January 30, 2025

set across one day, ‘orbital’ focuses on a crew of six astronauts as they orbit the earth from the international space station. this slim novel contains some of the most poetic, awe-inspiring prose i’ve read in a very long time. it’s set in space but it’s really a novel about the earth. it’s a beautiful meditation of humanity, the recognition of our fragility but a celebration of our hope. the overarching message continues to ring true long after you’ve closed the book: perhaps all is not lost if we take a step back and realise what it is that we’d be losing.

rating: 4.5

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Orbital

Samantha Harvey

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