Samantha Harvey

They focus on the quietest, most mundane moments of existence.

And this brings us to Samantha Harvey's novel, Orbital.

This book won the Booker Prize, which is a massive achievement in the literary world, and its placement on this Read Harder list is a striking contrast to everything we've discussed so far.

It is essential to define what we mean by literary fiction in this context.

Because if that thin blue line vanishes, everything is gone.

Precisely.

Samantha Harvey captures this cognitive shift perfectly by focusing on the mundane tasks of survival, like eating or exercising to fight the physical decay of muscle atrophy, while constantly hovering over the entirety of human existence.

The novel becomes a meditation on fragility.

And it's a slim novel.

It's not a big, long epic by any means, but it reminds me a little bit of Samantha Harvey's Orbital.

Yeah, I read it.

You know, I didn't read it while I was writing the book.

Around that same time, many of us flocked to the movie theaters to see Ryan Gosling in the blockbuster movie Project Hail Mary, a science fiction adventure about an ordinary teacher turned astronaut who uses science, courage, and an unlikely friendship with an alien to save Earth and another civilization from an extinction level threat.

But for me, the most profound encounter with outer space this past year came not with a spacecraft or in a movie theater, but in a novel, Orbital, winner of the 2024 Booker Prize by Samantha Harvey.

Sometimes described as a space pastoral, Orbital follows six astronauts, four men and two women, from five different countries aboard a space station over the course of a single day.

Through 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets, they bear witness to the Earth spinning beneath them, continents passing, weather systems forming, seasons changing.

[laughs]

And looking at it now, I've realized I've read one of these books, Orbital, uh, by Samantha Harvey, which is a fascinating, fascinating book.

So exciting to have more, as you said, to add to the list and, and dig into.

Yeah, if you're listening right now and you're like, "Oh, I wanna check that out," you can see the lists online.

[laughs]

Well, in the meantime, while I was, uh, while I got disappointed by not being able to get that book, I, I was scanning around in Libby and found a book called Orbital by Samantha Harvey that was very highly, uh, acclaimed, and, uh, it's also a very short novella, and I read it.

And it- don't read this if you're expecting sci-fi.

This is more like a tone poem of what it must feel like to be an astronaut in space.

we should talk about that sometime too.

And in 2024, Samantha Harvey won the prize for her novella Orbital, which was quite a different type of book as well.

So each year, a five-person panel consisting of authors, publishers and journalists, as well as politicians, actors, artists and musicians are appointed by the Booker Prize Foundation and they choose the winning book.

So quite sort of controversially, I think Sarah Jessica Parker was among the judges this year, actress of Sex and the City fame.