As I was reading this book, I found myself asking many questions such as "What is really the point of going to space?"
Being told in the perspective of astronauts orbiting the Earth,it makes me wonder how was it like seeing our planet from the outside. This book is like romantacizing your daily repetitve life (just like what the astronauts do)and making it poetic. The chapters titled as the no. of orbits, telling the story the astronauts through beautiful and moving prose. Sunsets and sunrises,oceans and seas - they tried to picture every little thing on Earth from the space as they navigate on how to preserve their recycled oxygen and how to handle grief while they are years away from their home.
In the end, this book tells me one thing - life goes on. No matter what happens, the Earth will still be Earth and we will still be another form of life in our planet.

This was an interesting read. I do not know how I would rate it at this time but I was engaged the whole time--I do wish there was a bit of a more fleshed out ending.

2.5 stars

I would not have finished "Orbital" had it been more than 200 pages, because the book is so dry. And I expected more from it, seeing as it’s made the 2024 Booker Prize Longlist.

Samantha Harvey gives us a day in the life of six astronauts orbiting the earth in a space station. Two of the space explorers are from Russia, and the other four are from the United States, Italy, England, and Japan. So by all rights, the story should’ve been interesting. Six individuals from a variety of cultures living together in space – so much room for great storytelling.

But Harvey drops the ball. There’s no plot, no character development, no drama, no tension. Instead of focusing on the astronauts, earth is her main character. The book is 200 pages of endless descriptions of what earth looks like from space, and it was all I could do to even skim through it because it’s so boring. Harvey does throw in interesting snippets of the lives of the astronauts, of a secondary space mission to the moon, and of a brewing typhoon set to wreak mass destruction, but these passages are so few and so brief that it’s not enough to carry the book.

I’m sure others may find "Orbital" to be a worthwhile read, as there are some nice meditations on the interconnectedness of the world and mankind’s small place in it, and about how our beloved planet is both a source of great beauty and horrible devastation. But I just couldn’t connect with it, and it feels like such a missed opportunity.


My sincerest appreciation to Samantha Harvey, Atlantic Monthly Press, and NetGalley for the digital review copy. All opinions included herein are my own.

This book has some of the most beautiful writing I have ever read. It made me marvel at the beauty of the planet we live on and appreciate the significance of so many things that are taken for granted.

Set on a spaceship that is orbiting low over Earth (250 miles above), this is more of a stream of consciousness of the six people in it, four men and two women, astronauts from different parts of the world who see how little their differences back on Earth matter while in vast space looking out at the planet as they experience the shift in day and night every ninety minutes.

"They look into the face of one of those five people and there in their way of smiling or concentrating or eating is everything and everyone they’ve ever loved, all of it, just there, and humanity, in coming down in its essence to this handful of people, is no longer a species of confounding difference and distance but a near and graspable thing."

Communication with their loved ones brings thoughts of home. One of them loses her mother and grapples with her grief at not being able to go back and see her and recalls her childhood memories. Another worries for the family of a fisherman in the Philippines whom he had met while honeymooning and hopes they will be safe from the typhoon that is rapidly approaching and that can be seen in all its fury from his position above Earth. One of them thinks about the miserable state of his marriage and wonders about doing something about it when he gets back. They all have this feeling of a new bond with each other because of where they are.

"They have talked before about a feeling they often have, a feeling of merging. That they are not quite distinct from one another, nor from the spaceship. Whatever they were before they came here, whatever their differences in training or background, in motive or character, whatever country they hail from and however their nations clash, they are equalised here by the delicate might of their spaceship."

There is a lot of philosophical discourse and talk about their faith or lack of it. One astronaut thinks about a discussion she had with another about creation where she said that the wildness and ferocity of space-time around them could only have been the work of a heedless beautiful force and he countered that it was exactly for the same reasons that creation had to be the work of a heedful beautiful force, causing her to then wonder

"Is that all the difference there is between their views, then– a bit of heed? Is Shaun’s universe just the same as hers but made with care, to a design? Hers an occurrence of nature and his an artwork?"

How they view Earth from their unique vantage point is described in such a mellifluous tone of colour and vibrance. When they see the seamless expanse before them, they think there cannot possibly be any barriers anywhere and they want to protect the loveliness they glimpse.

"They were warned in their training about the problem of dissonance. They were warned about what would happen with repeated exposure to this seamless earth. You will see, they were told, its fullness, its absence of borders except those between land and sea. You’ll see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war."

Their perspective of everything changes because of the distance they are viewing things from and they start thinking about how humans have shaped Earth to fulfill their own desires and are now moving into space and calling it progress but actually attempting to conquer another frontier.

"When he thinks of the six of them here, or the astronauts now going to the moon, he hears that haunting call– that’s what we’re doing when we come into space, asserting our species by extending its territory. Space is the one remaining wilderness we have. The solar system into which we venture is just the new frontier now our earthly frontiers have been discovered and plundered. That’s all this great human endeavour of space exploration really is, he thinks, an animal migration, a bid for survival. A looping song sent into the open, a territorial animal song."

It helps them make sense of their own insignificance and importance at the same time and realise the meaning of having a good life on this planet we call home.

Through their inner monologues and conversations, we experience what they are seeing and feeling and it's an amazing journey. There is just something unexplainable that touched me while I was reading.

Third of the 2024 Booker Longlist for me to read.

This is a perfectly respectable piece of work, and I can see how/why it made its way onto the Booker longlist, and why certain readers are kvelling over it. Unfortunately, I am not that kind of reader. Although I appreciate well-constructed and impressive prose, which this certainly contains, I really read for plot and character development, and this, really has neither.

It follows the thoughts and preoccupations of six astronauts (or to be precise four astronauts and two Russian cosmonauts) over 24 hours as they orbit sixteen times in a space shuttle around the Earth. There are some scattered, tepid attempts at backstory, but the six characters remain fairly superficial and one-dimensional throughout, mainly defined by where they came from initially and their families back on Earth. Some of the technical information about what goes on in space was intermittently of interest, but since the topic holds little allure for me, and due to the sixteen orbits being a bit repetitious, I was never very actively engaged.

I see from her bio that Harvey has done postgraduate studies in philosophy, and that is also evident. Rather than focusing on an actual story, the book concentrates on her various philosophical and environmental musings about man's existence/purpose on planet Earth. Again, I found little of this that novel, particularly deep, or thought-provoking, since it just seemed synthesized/recycled from things I've heard or read before.

As the author seems to be a favorite of Gaby Wood, the Booker's Executive Director (who called her 'this generation's Virginia Woolf'), this might very well make it to the short list, or perhaps even win. It just wasn't for me and I'm hoping for something more congenial to take the prize.

My thanks to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for the ARC regardless.

I really disliked this reading experience. The author took ideas about space travel and tried to make it poetic. The ideas were not very original, and she resorted to filling her chapters with lists. So many lists! She described the view from space as “so endlessly repetitive”. Like this book.

There's something about confinement and isolation that makes for a good story. Harvey's gorgeous prose highlights the mundane minutiae experienced in the background of the most interesting job in (or out of) the world.

A meditative and lyrical exploration of the human mind and its capacities for wonder in space. A beautiful cast of characters.

Samantha Harvey (Dear Thief) offers readers a slim but radiant novel of space, exploration, and meaning-making in Orbital, her fifth novel, which details the myriad depths held in just one day in the lives of six astronauts orbiting the Earth on an international space station.

Six men and women circle the planet at 17,500 miles per hour, a pace that takes a standard 24 hours and "throws sixteen days and nights at them in return." This mind-bending math is just a small slice of the disassociation thrust upon the six in space. They whirl about the Earth at an unfathomable pace that feels to them like stillness, tracking days with ticks on the wall, making lists of joys and anxieties and memories, gazing at photos, and sending e-mails back to family at home. They study microbes, viruses, fungi, and bacteria; observe 40 mice and their reactions to adjusted gravity in space; make notes on the human experience of space stations and space itself; observe the Earth and its weather systems from miles and miles away.

With Orbital, Harvey gives readers a powerful novel that, in less than 200 pages, manages to explore questions of philosophy and religion, faith, existence, meaning-making, art, grief, and gratitude, just to name a few. Her luscious and lyrical language is as close to poetry as it is to prose ("Outside the earth reels away in a mass of moonglow, peeling backward as they forge towards its edgeless edge"). Orbital is a gift of language, a meditation on meaning, and a beautiful exploration of perspective. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer

More a prose poem than a novel, Harvey's slim, evocative volume is a minutely detailed description of one day aboard the International Space Station. Divided into chapters according to the station's orbits around the Earth (sixteen in one day), the novel delves into both the personal and the mechanical with equal degrees of sensitivity and emotional remove. We learn about the station's routines, the compromises and indignities of life in zero gravity, and the mechanics of maintaining the station and caring for the—far from pristine, in fact practically messy—space around it. Back on Earth, a mega-typhoon is forming, which the astronauts observe with dismay. Meanwhile, passing by and beyond the station, a just-launched rocket bids to deliver the first manned lunar mission in decades.

Orbital shifts between the points of view of the station's six astronauts—two Russians, and four American-backed from various countries. We learn about their lives—Japanese Chie has recently been rocked by the news of her mother's death, and is musing about her parents' history and how it inspired her to go into space; Englishwoman Nell exchanges emails with her husband even as she acknowledges that she has no idea what his life looks like, having spent only a few months together during the four years of her training. As they conduct experiments, perform repairs, collect garbage, and observe the aging station's messiness and disrepair, they frequently muse about the contrast between the grandeur of space travel in the abstract, and its mundane realities. Their days are spent careening between awe at the sights they've seen and the experiences they've gotten to have, resigned frustration at the cramped, smelly quarters and physical discomfort of life aboard the station, and recognition of the tremendous costs they've accepted for this rare opportunity—separation from their families, long-term physical effects of low gravity and radiation. All of them are aware that they are doing something objectively absurd, but also can't shake their belief that it is profoundly meaningful. Their intense disconnect from the Earth and the rest of humanity causes them to muse about their place in both, about humanity's conflicting impulses towards destruction and sublime achievement, and about their own inherent contradictions—as soon as they've achieved the thing they've been working towards for decades, they immediately turn back and think about what they've left behind. (All of this makes Orbital an interesting companion piece to Martin MacInnes's recently-discussed In Ascension.)

Orbital, however, is not purely a novel of character. The narrative slips into the astronauts' minds with ease, but it just as easily leaves them behind. It lets us see them as individuals, but just as often regards them as a singular whole, ultimately no different from any of the people who preceded them on the station, or who will follow them in the future—people who have probably had the same observations about how annoying it is to go to the bathroom in zero gravity, or the mingled freedom and terror of EVA. Just as frequently, the novel pulls back from character entirely, telling us about the workings of the station, the movement of the typhoon, or simply cataloguing the progression of those sixteen orbits and the parts of the planet they overfly. With a god's-eye view of the planet, Harvey muses poetically, and yet also with dry precision, about the image of the Earth from space, its shifting colors as the sun sets and rises, the landmasses that emerge and drift away, the typhoon as it forms and heads towards land. The narrative is full of geographical, technical, and historical detail, which creates a somewhat documentary effect, so dry and factual that readers will be expecting something dramatic to happen—for something to go wrong with the lunar mission, for the typhoon to have even more catastrophic effects than anticipated, or something even worse and more unexpected. There is a sense here of a calm before the storm. Eventually, however, one realizes that it is that calm—which is, of course, deceptive, concealing as it does ordinary human ferment and frustration—that is the point. As the station sails around and around the Earth, as its inhabitants are caught between wonder and tedium, and as the whole project of human spaceflight—of human endeavor, really—carries on, Orbital carries us confidently towards its conclusion, which is really just the beginning of another day.

Classify this as literary fiction with a slight scifi twist. Orbital is a deeply reflective and poetic take on humanity from low earth orbit. This follows six astronauts from across the globe on a nine month journey around our planet however, this story does not follow a linear path. Well, the writing style was beautiful; ultimately, I am not usually the audience for literary scifi. This is a story completely rooted in emotion with very little plot so if that’s your vibe, then this is gonna be a book for you.

This was an experience, watching the world go by - our blue green planet, through the eyes of six men and women as they finish one final mission. A meditative study on the world around as seen from several thousands of kilometers from above as the astronauts go about their life. There are glimpses into their lives, their experiences and the calm lyrical prose of the author that transmigrates the reader to that wonderful space of wonder and dream.

what a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

<i>Thanks to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for providing me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.</i>

Thank you to NetGalley for the eARC of Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

It's not something that will ever happen in my life, but I have always wanted to go to space. When I read sci-fi, or watch shows and movies with space travel, I am always in awe (the awe often accompanied by a pang of jealousy).

Orbital was a lovely read for me. Reading this small novella of astronauts' experiences gave me a wonderful immersive experience into what would be my fantasy dream come true.

"Orbital" presents a fascinating concept of space themes without typical sci-fi elements, but the execution disappoints. While Harvey's prose occasionally shines, it often feels overwrought, with characters remaining underdeveloped. The novel's structure lacks coherence, blending sections without clear purpose. While it prompts existential contemplation, it ultimately lacks narrative substance.

This beautifully written, meditative novella on what it is to be human was right in my wheelhouse. I loved it so much I went ahead and purchased my own copy to keep after I was done. My thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the complimentary reading copy.

Written in a dreamy floaty style, this novella follows the day to day thoughts of a bunch of astronauts and cosmonauts on the space station as it orbits the earth. I guess I was supposed to take some philosophical insights from this but it didn’t work for me.

I was moved and changed by reading "Orbital." Samantha Harvey has gifted us with an amazingly articulated deep dive into space, the universe, and our place in it. It was an awe inspiring word picture that I could see as clearly as a NASA video. I predict a movie deal.

There were astronauts and families and people who are loved but, for me, their stories were usurped by the brilliance of space. Orbital changed my outlook, making everything feel simultaneously grander and smaller at the same time. How could I not give it 5*?

A group of astronauts and cosmonauts are on the last orbital flight around the Earth before the program is halted. We meet them and discover moments in their lives as they go about their duties, watching the progress of a typhoon, and interacting with each other.

Well-written prose illuminates the inner lives of these incredibly skilled and special people; the author conveys the science of what they are doing and what is happening to their bodies, but we also get an almost stream of consciousness feel to the 'nauts' thoughts as they consider their personal histories and their musings on the planet below them.

Even while I was reading this, I was trying to figure out what the author was saying through this plot-light book. This felt more like a meditation, a rumination on the short-sightedness of humans, even while it seemed to be celebrating the utter marvel that is the Earth.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Grove Atlantic for this ARC in exchange for my review.

Told over the course of one earth day by six astronauts as they orbit Earth, Orbital is a quiet, contemplative look at space and humanity. Recommended for fans of character-driven, thought-provoking, "all vibes no plot" books.

This was a beautiful exploration of people and our planet. It was a short but illuminating book that felt like a literary meditation. The prose was beautiful.