Orbital

De: Samantha Harvey

Narrado por: Sarah Naudi

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024

Winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize

Shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

Shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction

A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours

"Ravishingly beautiful."—Joshua Ferris, New York Times

A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos, and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.

Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.

©2023 Samantha Harvey (P)2023 Penguin Audio

One of the most beautiful novels ever.

Profoundly poetic and inspiring. Stunning prose. This and All the Beautiful Horses may be my all time favorites.

The remive from emotion the speaker gives as the story progresses.

So dry.
So far removed from joy and beauty.
Interesting but felt very clinical.
Good attempt at multinational representation but still-very dry.

A short delight

Harvey uses the trajectory of an orbiting space station experiencing an unearthly sixteen sunrises in a single day as it traverses around the planet to trace out the apparent plotlessness of human life on spaceship earth as we float in space.

Within this framework she focuses the lenses wide and long as we take in the whole world, micro to macro, the progress of humankind, the evolution of life and the universe and the oneness we should feel being in this rather lonely universe.

This was a short delight.

Lyrical narration

Poetic, lyrical, profound descriptions of life on the space station as the astronauts experience multiple days and nights on earth as they speed around the planet over and over. We are given a tour of the earth through sunrises and sunsets and their connections to earth which are both grounding and mystical.

A fine blend of prose and poetry

A wonderful voyage through the void. The blend of pros and poetry was really something unique. Not a lot of action.

The Booker winner? Really?

Like others here, I am dumbfounded that this won the Booker. (Percival Everett must be seething.) While the endless descriptions are at times lyrical, inventive, and thought-provoking, the key word here is ‘endless.’ Turns out that mere description does not a novel make. In the last several orbits (that is, chapters) the writing seemed to run down just like the spaceship the characters were riding, devolving into tediously repetitive list-making. The characters were paper dolls; although the author spent a great deal of time describing their thoughts, I never felt that there was a person inside any of those six creations who was actually thinking or feeling those thoughts. It’s a rare feat for a short novel to feel endless, but the number of times I checked to see how much time I had left may have set a new Audible record.

Perspective of inner and outer space

Fascinating exploration of what astronauts must experience as they hurtle around the earth. Shifting perspectives on many levels that broadened me out of my usual limits.

The poetry

I loved the thought provoking imagery and the beautiful way in which the story was told.

Many passages to really think about, terrible audiobook

I'm not sure how the narrator chose this profession.. she has an off-again, mostly on-again lisp, but what makes for more difficult listening is that she completely aspirated or doesn't even pronounce the final "s" sounds of most words. at least for plural words you can usually tell it by context, but for other parts I had no clue what word(s) she had just said. I felt like this would've made for an enjoyable listening otherwise..

a meditation more than a novel

The writing is quite lyrical and evocative, but there's essentially no plot and only sketches of characters. Really disliked the wispy-voiced narration style. Recording seems to have some technical issues where the sound fades in and out as if the reader was shifting in her seat.