I read Orbital in one sitting on a train from Utrecht to Groningen, which is roughly two hours, and I remember looking up somewhere past Zwolle and feeling slightly offended that the landscape was so flat. The book had just shown me the Himalayas from four hundred kilometres up. Samantha Harvey’s novel is short, 136 pages in the hardback, and it does something I did not expect from a Booker winner: it slowed me down. After the sheer energy of James by Percival Everett, this felt like the opposite kind of book, and I needed it.
Why I picked it up
I had been circling Orbital since it won the Booker Prize in November 2024. The premise sounded like something I would admire more than enjoy: six astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station, one day, sixteen orbits, no aliens, no disaster, no plot to speak of. I am not a space person. I have never watched a rocket launch on purpose. What finally convinced me was a friend who said, a little impatiently, that it is not a book about space at all. She was right. It is a book about looking at the Earth.
What it is about
Each chapter is one orbit of ninety minutes. The crew of six come from Japan, the United States, Britain, Italy and Russia, and Harvey gives them names and histories but not much in the way of drama. Chie, the Japanese astronaut, learns that her mother has died and cannot go home. A typhoon builds over the Pacific and the crew watch it from above, knowing people they care about are underneath it. In between there are experiments with mice, exercise routines, meals from pouches, and a great deal of silence. The sentences loop and gather and sometimes run for half a page, and I found that the only way to read them was to stop skimming. That is harder than it sounds when you spend your working day reading in fragments.
I will not pretend it is a page-turner. It is a page-lingerer, if that is a word. There were moments when I wanted a little more friction between the characters, and readers who need a story that goes somewhere may put it down. But Harvey apparently wrote most of it during lockdown, watching live footage of the Earth from orbit on her screen, and you can feel that odd combination of confinement and enormous view on every page.
Why you should read the book
Because it is 136 pages, and in those pages it manages to make the planet feel both very small and unreasonably precious, without once lecturing you about the climate. Harvey trusts the view to do the work. I have read plenty of books that told me to pay attention to the world; this one just quietly made me do it. I closed it, put my phone in my bag, and watched the fields go by until Groningen, which, given how I feel about screens these days, is about the highest praise I have for a novel.
If you are the sort of reader who needs something to happen, read it anyway, but read it slowly, and preferably with a window. Have you read Orbital? I would love to know whether it worked for you, or whether you were waiting for the plot the whole way through.