Samantha Harvey has been awarded the prestigious Booker Prize for her novel Orbital.
Orbital, a 2023 novel by English writer Samantha Harvey, is a celebration of diversity and international cooperation. Published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Grove Atlantic in the US, the novel, told over the course of 24 hours, follows six astronauts from Japan, Russia, the United States, Britain, and Italy (men and women) aboard the International Space Station as they orbit above the Earth. The novel’s narrative structure, which includes the reflections of the astronauts on humanity and the Earth, as well as the inclusion of the narrative of an alien, a robot, and a pre-historic human sailing on the sea, sets it apart. Each chapter of the book covers a single 90-minute orbit around the Earth, with 16 orbits in 24 hours.
The novel was well received by critics. It won the 2024 Booker Prize and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political fiction and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for imaginative fiction.
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