Orbital

By Samantha Harvey

In Orbital, Samantha Harvey crafts a luminous, contemplative novel that floats above plot and plunges deep into the rhythms of existence. Set aboard the International Space Station, the story unfolds over a single Earth day—though for the six astronauts orbiting at 17,000 miles per hour, that day fractures into sixteen sunrises and sunsets, a kaleidoscope of light and time.

Harvey’s prose is almost celestial in its elegance. She doesn’t chase drama or sci-fi spectacle. Instead, she offers a quiet symphony of thought, sensation, and fleeting memory. The astronauts—Pietro, Nell, Shaun, Chie, Roman, and Anton—are sketched with delicate brushstrokes. Their backstories are gestural, their inner lives shaped by grief, wonder, and the surreal intimacy of sharing air in a tin can above Earth.

Time in Orbital is elastic, slippery. Harvey explores how space distorts our sense of chronology, identity, and even mourning. Chie’s mother dies while she’s in orbit, and her grief floats—literally—as tears drift and are caught midair. The astronauts observe Earth’s beauty and devastation from afar: typhoons, wildfires, and the aching loneliness of a planet that feels both infinite and fragile.

There’s humor too—national toilets divided by Cold War politics, shared meals and overused air—but it’s the philosophical undercurrent that lingers. Harvey asks: What does it mean to be human when stripped of gravity, borders, and the illusion of permanence? Can distance bring clarity, or only more questions?

Orbital reads like a long prose poem, a meditation on the strangeness of being alive. It’s not a novel of action—it’s a novel of atmosphere, of thought, of quiet revelations. And in its shimmering stillness, it reminds us that Earth, viewed from above, is both heartbreakingly beautiful and heartbreakingly ours.