Orbital: Samantha Harvey

A beautiful, unusual choice for the 2024 Booker Prize

One common critique I’ve read of literary fiction - the stuff that wins prizes and whose authors are interviewed in the Paris Review - that it almost exclusively deals with the domestic, the small, human relationships, which limits and narrows their scope. That it makes no comment on the state of the world.

2024 Booker Prize winner Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is far from domestic. It is set far off in space, and covers a day in the life of six astronauts- well, four astronauts from the US, Italy, Britain, Japan, and two Russian cosmonauts. It goes outward, to their lives on earth, the lives of others around the world on earth, to their shifting emotions on their experience in space. And yet, like other prize winners, its central concern is with character and the inner and outer lives of its characters. And through this, you realize that we as humans have more in common than our outward differences and identities, and connecting and loving one another, even if we individuals aren’t what s…