By Samantha Harvey | Review by Alisha Erin Hillam
The Book Club’ s September read was Samantha Harvey’ s achingly beautiful novel, Orbital. Winner of the 2025 Man Booker Prize, the novel is a snapshot of a single day aboard the International Space Station, as told by a semiomniscient narrator through the perspectives of the six astronauts living there. The book cycles through these six characters and their backstories, as well as a rolling meditation on planet Earth, humankind, and the push and pull relationship between the two.
ORBITAL
Orbital is a unique work, in that the plot is secondary to the feelings Harvey is trying to evoke in her readers about Earth itself. To this end, she eschews the traditional risingand-falling-action wave of Western storytelling, and instead embraces a spiral structure that returns her, again and again, to characters, their concerns, and meditations on Earth— as a planet, as a home, as a subject of human destruction— in a looping pattern that mirrors the path of the space station itself. Again and again, we follow the rotation of the countries and continents sliding away below the ISS; again and again, Harvey reflects on the existence of Earth and its meaning for us.
The characters appear in this rolling fashion accompanied by a host of human experience. They are grappling with grieving loved ones, staring down cancer, questioning religion and belief, missing their families, avoiding marital problems, and more— not to mention completing their complicated jobs in an extremely hostile environment. All the while, Harvey intersperses their very human, very relatable problems, with an ever-deepening awareness of and gratitude for the planet spinning below them.“ Without that Earth,” Harvey writes,“ we are all finished. We couldn’ t survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea.” But we do have it, and with an acute warning of climate change and environmental destruction held tight in one hand, Harvey offers up reverence with the other:“ The Earth, from here, is like heaven … here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.”
It must be said, it is not a book for everyone. Harvey is far more interested in poetics than plot, and for the reader looking for sci-fi— this is not that either. Our book club was split on who enjoyed it, and how much. For my part, I found the observations powerful and the language moving. But we all agreed that the reflections on Earth— which, Harvey writes, is“ is the answer to every question”— renewed our appreciation of this planet we call home.
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