In the span of 200 pages, we are spun around the earth 16 times. The dizzying narrative is an ode to Samantha Harvey’s brilliance. She helps us experience something entirely unrelatable: hurtling through space in a burning capsule. As we try to find our footing in zero gravity, we meet six astronauts from six countries. Between the looping narrative about the earth as seen from space, the International Space Station’s (ISS) inhabitants invite us into their claustrophobic lives. As astronauts, they interchangeably perform official tasks, but as individuals they each become the heart, conscience, soul, bones, and lungs of the craft. While being flung 250 miles from earth, they are all relatable in their boredom, wonder, and grief.

The British novelist Samantha Harvey is no stranger to literary accolades, with her first novel Wilderness being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009. However, during interviews she admitted that after writing 5000 words of Orbital, she began to harbour doubts about her qualification to write a ‘scientific’ book. She knew little about space, so she abandoned the project and only picked it up during the 2019 pandemic. It’s a good thing she did, because Orbital went on to win the 2024 Booker Prize. She recounts that she spent hours online watching the ISS live feed of the earth. Despite the research involved, what makes Orbital truly brilliant is the human experience of home.

Astronomy holds such a simple and elementary beauty that it can spark the curiosity of a child. It is probably why so many children dream of being astronauts and experiencing space. The sky is empty and exhaustive at the same time, both inviting and terrifying. Being an astronaut is a life-altering experience, but every aspect of it is daunting. The months of gruelling preparation, the risky launch, the loneliness coupled with the claustrophobia of life in a space station. The six astronauts and cosmonauts [astronauts from Russia are referred to as cosmonauts] in Orbital are introduced alone, with the solitude interrupted by brief moments of celebration. Their voluntary confinement is only interrupted by tethered spacewalks, when astronauts wear a spacesuit and go out into space for repairs and routine checks while tied to the space station with a tube. It is where the purest form of solitude is revealed. The emptiness of it all truly becomes apparent, and brings home Arthur C. Clarke astute observation: “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

During the first orbit, the author pulls us back to earth to consider the 17th century painter Diego Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas [The Ladies-in-Waiting]. The painting, when looked at briefly with the untrained eye, is an unremarkable scene with disjointed characters scattered across the canvas. In one bored glance the eye registers the little girl in a pretty, white dress and not much else. However, when we take a closer look, the deliberate uncertainty of the picture is revealed. Who is the subject? The obvious choice at first is the little girl, perhaps the daughter of the king and queen. A few strange characters fuss over her in the foreground. To the left is the painter himself, partially obscured by a large canvas. Is he gazing directly at the viewer, or is he merely trying to paint the king and queen, a reflection of whom we see in the mirror? Who is the mysterious man just leaving the room while looking back at us? Perhaps we ought to consider the dog, since it provides serenity in an otherwise unsettling and anxious setting. These explorations in the book repeatedly flow into deeper existential questions about the future of humanity.

During the 5th orbit, a particular photograph of the earth is dissected. It’s a 1969 picture of the lunar module with earth in the background. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were returning from a trip to the surface of the moon while Micheal Collins took the photo from the command module. Though superficially it is a photograph of our planet with half of it hidden in shadow, it is also a photograph of everyone who was alive in 1969. There is only one person missing: the photographer. In this fashion, Orbital repeatedly asks us to reconsider the seemingly ordinary, and revive the child-like wonder we all once held for the stars. As each of the astronauts sit by the window, they look at the earth they’ve intimately known as home, and yet they see anew a humbling vastness, the dimming and brightening of light, and the flowing colours of rivers diving back into the seas.

One can travel as far as space and still be inescapably tethered to home. In the 5th orbit, the Japanese astronaut is grieving the recent passing of her mother. She tries to keep her alive till she returns to earth by staring into her photograph. She has trained for months to remain calm and collected in space, and yet this intolerable grief is a silent explosion contained within her till she can return home. She refuses to talk about her, perhaps afraid that speaking of her will truly kill her. It is the kind of grief that cannot be shared.

Amid the extraordinary beauty and strangeness of earth, we are reminded of the catastrophe that is climate change. Vibrant landscapes and still oceans are interrupted by a typhoon inching closer to Southeast Asia. The astronauts can simply witness and report, helpless to stop what they see as inevitable destruction and loss. Similarly, we find climate change slowly encroaching on all that we hold dear, turning it dead and grey. And yet all we can do is witness and adjust to a new, compromised life. Our circumstances seem not to differ much from the lab rats on board the ISS. Locked in glass boxes, the astronauts study them to understand muscle wastage and bone decay in zero gravity. The oblivious mice are slowly decaying, their demise inevitable. The astronauts understand that, almost pity them, but too many things have already been set in motion to save any of them.

On a Tuesday in October, six astronauts aboard the ISS witnessed 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets in 24 hours. For those of us clinging to the earth’s surface, it may have been another ordinary day. Perspective changes everything, whether it’s a painting, a photograph or the view of our magnificent pale blue dot. In her persistence, Samantha Harvey’s contemplative prose pulls us from the mundane and unveils a new vantage point with which to see home. Paying attention evokes an almost maternal instinct to preserve and protect this magnificent accident that is life on earth. Orbital is a welcome and wondrous addition to the rare genre of science realism.