A few weeks before Orbital was selected for the Booker long list this summer, we chose it as one of our monthly fiction subscription titles. We were delighted to see it progress from the long list to the short list, and we were deighted again when it won the Booker Prize itself. There have since been lots of people saying lots of lovely things about the book, and Harvey herself has been wonderful to listen to about writing during lockdown, obsessing over the video feed from the international space station and about the sheer unreality of hearing her name called.

I’m delighted for her, and for this book, all anew. I’m a staunch advocate for books that are brief and intense. An idea sustained brightly for 130 pages is a wonderful prospect, and if it manages to subtly reorder my brain in the duration of those 130 pages, then so much the better. Here is the introduction I wrote back in August for subscribers who received Orbital from us. If you’d like to explore our fiction subscription offer, you can do so here.

I knew as soon as I had finished Orbital, or perhaps even before then, that I would be desperate to make sure it would be as widely read by our customers as possible. It is one of those books that is just not like the others.   

Six astronauts orbit the earth in a spacecraft, they will traverse the planet sixteen times in the space of 24 hours. They watch as light and darkness chase each other across oceans and continents. They have a perspective their minds were not made to perceive. Surrounded by the vast, sublime indifference of space, protected only by a metal carcass from being instantly crushed, they go about the minutiae of their routine. They eat, brush their teeth, record data, and they stare with bewildered tenderness at Earth, which seems so present and so implausible. They are a community unlike any other, and also each alone in a way that will be impossible for them to convey to their loved ones when they eventually return to them. I felt something like a sense of vertigo while reading Orbital, caught somehow between claustrophobia and agoraphobia, combined with a sense of almost painful beauty. It is a book that offers a very physical reminder of our human smallness and briefness.