Orbital

Winner of the Booker Prize 2024. Chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, describes the winner as 'a book about a wounded world' adding that the panel's 'unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition'.

Life on our planet as you've never seen it before.

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?

"Orbital is a hopeful book and it studies people who act on their hope. It’s an Anthropocene book resistant to doom."

"Reading Orbital is a dizzying experience; she evokes the texture of daily life in the space station and pans out to sweeping, lyrical descriptions of the natural world, underpinning both with profound questions about our place in the cosmos. It is an extraordinary achievement, containing multitudes." - The Guardian