Orbital
Almost nothing happens across sixteen orbits of the Earth, and the novel won the Booker Prize anyway, on sustained attention alone.
Six astronauts circle the Earth sixteen times in a single day, and almost nothing happens. Harvey writes the planet as seen from above and the interior lives of people who cannot look away from it, in a novel that won the Booker Prize on the strength of its attention rather than its incident.
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Maria Popova
Such a perspective is what Samantha Harvey invites in her breathtaking novel Orbital (public library) — the imagistic chronicle of the sixteen sunrises and sunsets seen and felt by the six astronauts suspended between the creaturely and the cosmic aboard the International Space Station.
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