MAR 19 | 6:30pm at McNally Jackson Seaport
Samantha Harvey presents Orbital, in conversation with Molly Young
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WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024. A singular novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours
"Ravishingly beautiful." — Joshua Ferris, New York Times
A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan--have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below.
We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.
Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.
Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels, Orbital, The Western Wind, Dear Thief, All Is Song, and The Wilderness, which won the Betty Trask Prize, and one work of nonfiction, The Shapeless Unease. Her books have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, and the James Tait Black Prize, as well as longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize. She lives in Bath, UK, and teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.
Molly Young writes about books for the New York Times and is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. Her journalism and essays have appeared in n+1, The Poetry Foundation and others. Her zine "The Things They Fancied" was named one of NPR's Best Books of 2020. With Teddy Blanks she runs a small press that most recently published the novel Miriam by Kate Riley, which was excerpted in the Paris Review.