Orbital

Samantha Harvey's Orbital won the 2024 Booker Prize, and the judges called it "formally daring" for good reason. At 136 pages, it is the shortest novel to win the Booker since 1979, and Harvey uses that compression deliberately: six astronauts circle the Earth sixteen times in a single day, and she renders each loop with the quiet intensity of someone who understands that the mundane and the sublime are never far apart in a sealed capsule 250 miles up.

The crew members come from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan. They eat dehydrated meals, exercise against muscle loss, and exchange brief messages with family members whose voices arrive across an impossible distance. Harvey never lets the novel become a technical thriller or a survival story. It stays resolutely in the interior, tracing what happens to consciousness when the planet you grew up on becomes the thing you orbit rather than the ground beneath your feet.

Compact enough to assign whole, Orbital is a natural choice for courses in contemporary fiction, ecocriticism, or the literature of space and exploration. Harvey's prose is precise and unhurried, and the novel's formal conceit (one full day, sixteen sunrises) opens productive conversations about time, scale, and the limits of the human perspective. Published by Grove Atlantic.