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Orbital

A Novel (Booker Prize Winner)
By Samantha Harvey
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Brief Description
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024 - A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER New York Times Book Review Book Club Pick Stephen Colbert's The Late Show Book Club Pick Winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize Shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction Shortlisted for the... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
$4900

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"... an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours."--Provided by publisher.

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WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024 - A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

New York Times Book Review Book Club Pick

Stephen Colbert's The Late Show Book Club Pick

Winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize
Shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2024 Climate Fiction Prize

One of Barack Obama's Favourite Books of 2024

A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours.

"Ravishingly beautiful." - Joshua Ferris, New York Times

A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men travelling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below.

We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet.

Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.

Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780802163622

Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 29 October 2024

Country: United States

Imprint: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Weight: 0g

Pages: 224

Collections

Fiction General Fiction Literary Fiction Samantha Harvey Sci-Fi & Fantasy Science Fiction

About the Author

Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels, Orbital, The Western Wind, Dear Thief, All Is Song, and The Wilderness, and one work of nonfiction, The Shapeless Unease. Orbital was the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, and her other work has been shortlisted for the Women's Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Prize, and the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness was awarded the Betty Trask Prize. She lives in Bath, UK, and teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.

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  • Booker Prize
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  • The Western Wind
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