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the complete review - fiction

Orbital

by
Samantha Harvey

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : nicely done

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Generally very positive

  From the Reviews:

• "Loosely plotted, much of the novel's action occurs in the characters' heads. (...) Harvey raises a clarion call without being preachy. And she does not allow her space travellers to succumb to ecological despair." - Mia Levitin, Financial Times
  
  
• "There are moments in Orbital when wonder, like happiness, writes white. Thrilled reports of exquisite light effects start to fall a little flat. The beauty of the book is at work less in its explicit hymns of praise than deep in its rhythms and structures. And it's here that some of the most compelling thinking goes on -- about the spectacular and the ordinary, distance and intimacy. There are sentences that start with a Miltonic boom and move to a gentle hum. (...) Orbital is a hopeful book and it studies people who act on their hope. It's an Anthropocene book resistant to doom." - Alexandra Harris, The Guardian
  
  
• "Another writer might have used this material for a sci-fi novel or exploited the dramatic opportunities of space to write a character study. Harvey opts for neither of these routes. At times, Orbital feels almost like a long poem. (...) If the pleasures of this kind of writing are evident, so are the dangers. Orbital might have had too much of ‘a sense of level-headed distance about it’ (not something one tends to want from fiction). Thankfully, it stays focused on people, and things, and the bright blue Earth." - Sam Reynolds, Literary Review
  
  
• "Samantha Harvey’s rich new novel, Orbital, turns the world-in-a-day idea around, playing with both its key terms. (...) The consistent pitching of events in a low key, the seemingly perverse determination to keep the tension from mounting, so that energy is held in suspension rather than discharged, is far from arbitrary. It is designed to make the emphasis fall elsewhere, on rapture. It’s hard to think of a book in which the lyrical impulse is so strongly and so successfully relied on. This is space aria rather than space opera, with the drama of getting into orbit fully displaced by the wonder of being there. (...) The novel resists its own individuating drive by emphasising that many of the characters’ experiences are held in common. Variations of response are simply filtered out, the fact of separateness overridden." - Adam Mars-Jones, London Review of Books
  
  
• "Harvey manages, in taking readers along to the final frontier, to remind us less of our essential loneliness and more of our mutual dependence. (...) (E)ven at under 200 pages, Orbital is a complete novel, all the way to its conclusion. " - Bethanne Patrick, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "(T)his minimal fictionality is not really the point; it’s merely the ransom paid to the genre in order to resemble the novelistic. The point is everything else: the almost unimaginable unworldliness of the situation. (...) The real point of Orbital is the demonstration of how a writer might capture this spectacular strangeness in language adequate to the spectacle. (...) Samantha Harvey has written a magnificently strange and utterly original book that makes it just a little easier to believe in that particular miracle." - James Wood, The New Yorker
  
  
• "The book is ravishingly beautiful. It is also nearly free of plot. (...) Orbital is an assiduous day-in-the-life account of characters whose main business is to serve the riff -- on deep space, cosmic time, climate change, the meaning of life, the existence of God, the nature of progress. Always passionate and often moving, these riffs invariably come untethered from the characters who inspire them, and lack the mole of mediated thought." - Joshua Ferris, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "From the opening sentence, Harvey emphasises the extraordinary conditions of intimacy and isolation in which her characters exist (.....) Reading Orbital is a dizzying experience; she evokes the texture of daily life in the space station and pans out to sweeping, lyrical descriptions of the natural world, underpinning both with profound questions about our place in the cosmos. It is an extraordinary achievement, containing multitudes." - Stephanie Merritt, The Observer
  
  
• "In Orbital, her sixth book, she explores time again, especially the dissonance between how we experience it bodily -- insisted upon by mission control's prescriptive schedule enforcing diurnal rhythms -- and mentally. (...) Harvey demonstrates in this novel how binary divisions are at once meaningless and alive with hidden complexities. She invites us to step away from the choice between despair or hope for our future and embrace the creative potential of them together." - Emily Rhodes, The Spectator
  
  
• "Spare, poetic and powerful (.....) The strength of this book lies in Harvey's stunning and rhythmic descriptions of this constantly unravelling world. (...) Harvey is equally successful at immersing the reader in the intimate details of astronaut life (.....) Her book may lack traditional plot, but the beauty of the prose engages the reader fully and, overall, this is an uplifting book." - Alice Jolly, Sunday Times
  
  
• "Orbital, Harvey's fifth novel, is The Waves in space. (...) In outer space the author hits on the pure swirlingness that her previous works seem to aspire to. The characters' thoughts mix and flow with the colours and light. " - Kate McLoughlin, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Orbital is a day-in-the-life novel -- unusual for both its setting (a spacecraft, presumably the International Space Station) and the form of the day, as the earth-orbiting station circles the earth sixteen times during the course of what, down on the planet below, is a regular twenty-four-hour day (i.e. "They'll see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets, sixteen days and sixteen nights" over that span).
       There are six on board -- "four astronauts (American, Japanese, British, Italian) and two cosmonauts (Russian, Russian); two women, four men" -- and the novel drifts, like the spaceship, easily across their different experiences over the course of this day. The novel is loosely broken up into chapters each devoted to roughly one of the sixteen orbits (with some overlap -- 'Orbit 1, into orbit 2'), but the constant ever-forward motion, around and around, makes for a sense of continuity: there's little start or beginning to this (as also this day is just one of many, a seemingly almost random snapshot, one of many presumably near-identical ones).
       Little exceptional happens -- one crew member is dealing with the news of the death of mother, another is concerned about a lump on his neck he has discovered; little of the action rises above that -- and mostly Harvey simply describes the daily routine and activities, while also weaving in some of the crew members' memories and experiences, going back to childhood.
       Outside the station, there are some significant events -- notably, a large typhoon is swirling in the Pacific, which they photograph each time they pass over it (with one of the astronauts having something of a connection to what is happening below). And their own extraordinary experience is also put in some perspective by an even greater one that is happening, the Artemis launched for the moon, with humans to walk on the moon's surface for the first time in over fifty years, that spacecraft shooting by them into much farther reaches of space. (When Harvey wrote the book it seemed conceivable that the Artemis project would imminently send astronauts to the moon, but the best they've managed so far (as I write this, in May, 2026) is a lunar fly-by.)
       Harvey adeptly weaves all this together, managing to give a good sense of how mundane much is, even in such a locale and unusual conditions, yet always noting the sheer extraordinariness of this particular perspective (from the small things that are affected by being in a basically gravity-free environment to the grand thoughts this distant vantage point of the earth allows for). The writing doesn't strain too much, but manages to soar appropriately enough. The characters' different backgrounds and experiences are quite well conceived and presented, but it's the abstract -- the situation itself, as well as the impersonal (in the sense of being similar for each person) aspects of life on the space station that is the most appealing and interesting part of Orbital.
       A nice little success.

- M.A.Orthofer, 24 May 2026

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Links:

• Grove Press publicity page
• Vintage publicity page
• J'ai lu publicity page
• dtv publicity page
• NN Editore publicity page
• Anagrama publicity page
• Booker Prize, 2024
• Profile in The Guardian
• Reading the novel Orbital with a globe at hand by Ekaterina Petrova

• ArtsHub
• The Berkeley Beacon
• bookycnidaria.
• The Bookish Elf
• Bookmunch
• Books on the 7:47
• Cherwell
• La Civiltà Cattolica
• The Cornell Daily Sun
• Felix
• The Fiction Fox
• For Book Lovers and Random People
• The Guardian
• Highbrow Magazine
• JacquiWine's Journal
• The Johns Hopkins News-Letter
• Kirkus Reviews
• The Korea Times
• Literary Review
• The Los Angeles Times
• Magpie
• The Metropolitan Review
• The Modern Novel
• Open Letters Review
• The Oxford Blue
• The Oxford Student
• Premier
• Publishers Weekly
• Varsity
• World Socialist Web Site
• Writing at Large

• Official site
• Samantha Harvey at A.M.Heath

• See Index of Contemporary British fiction
• Index of Booker Prize for Fiction-winning works under review

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About the Author:

       British author Samantha Harvey was born in 1975.

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© 2026 the complete review

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