How did a plotless 136-page novel win the prestigious Booker Prize?
I understood by the first page
Last year when the Booker Prize announced its winning novel — Orbital by Samantha Harvey — I requested it from the library immediately. I did the same when Prophet Song by Paul Lynch was announced as the winner in 2023. But when I picked it up from the library, nothing about it compelled me to open it. I returned Prophet Song without having read a page.
If you’re not familiar, the Booker Prize1 is the prestigious award for the best novel published in the UK or Ireland. It’s a big deal. Prior winners have been Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (2020) and Lincoln in the Bardo by
.Six months after requesting Orbital from the library, the book became available and I read it last week. I never once considered putting it down like I did the previous year’s winner.
What, I wondered, was different about Orbital, the 136-page novel with very little plot, many characters, and a hard-to-follow narrator? Why was I able to stick with that novel when I could hardly open Prophet Song, a dystopian novel lauded for being propulsive and unflinching?
I found out on page one why Samantha Harvey, the first woman to win since 2019, received the Booker Prize for her wispy, dreamlike novel that can fit inside a small purse.
Orbital made a devout follower out of me with its opening paragraph:
Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams — of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.
In three meandering sentences we learn that we are in space, that the point of view is omniscient and all-knowing (“sometimes they dream the same dreams”), and that with Samantha Harvey’s work, we are in good hands (“Raw space is a panther, feral and primal.” Gorgeous).
I continued to page two, at which point I pulled out my phone to take a photo of a quote I loved. I wanted to underline it but couldn’t because I was reading the library’s copy.
The Milky Way is a smoking trail of gunpowder shot through a satin sky.
And one sentence later:
Out there it’s Argentina it’s the South Atlantic it’s Cape Town it’s Zimbabwe. Over its right shoulder the planet whispers morning — a slender molten breach of light. They slip through time zones in silence.
Propulsion refers to moving forward, and in the literary world, it’s a word we use to explain a book that keeps you flipping the pages. Orbital is the literal definition of propulsion, with astronauts and cosmonauts clipping around earth in the International Space Station (ISS), a “great H of metal.” But as far as the plot, propulsive is not a word I would use to describe it.
So why did this book win?
The Booker Prize answers that question here. What I’m really asking is, why did the book win for me? Why was I able to read this one and not Prophet Song? What about Orbital made me stick to a narration that I sometimes found challenging, and why, when I closed the book after reading the last line, did I sigh the recognizable exhale of a reader unsure of what to do next?
It’s three things, I think: the book’s unique structure, the lyrical narration, and its cutting social commentary. Plotless it may be (I don’t think Harvey herself would say otherwise; very little actually happens during those 24 hours; the plot is in the memories associated with the different astronauts and, if you define plot as a sequence of events, the repeated orbiting of earth), but I think this constraint is what made the book so good.
Memorable structure
Orbital takes place over 24 hours as six astronauts and cosmonauts make 16 orbits around the earth in the ISS. They experience a sunrise every 90 minutes. They twist and curl around the earth over and over again, confined for the duration of the novel to this small space.
This is a solid, easy-to-explain structure. Another way of putting it is that has a great designing principle2, or internal logic, which
talks about in depth here. With such a unique structure, it works that not much actually happens during those 24 hours. There are no explosive fights, no near-death experiences, no sounds of alarm from mission control, but the simplicity of the structure allows the narrator to dip in and out of the astronauts’ minds, giving us their histories in little vignettes of memory.Part of the structure is this interwoven point of view, which enters not only the six astronauts’ heads, but also briefly considers an alien’s and a robot’s thoughts, tells us what people down on earth are doing, and deliberates on what future lifeforms might think of humans today. All of these points of view are spun together by a narrator whose words ring out like “the hundred-cymbal clang of sudden daylight,” which is how the narrator describe the view of the Maldives, Sri Lanka, and the tip of India ripe with morning.
The narrative is labyrinthine. This switching around is discombobulating, and here we see more proof of Harvey’s cunning. Is the discombobulation we feel while reading not unlike what the astronauts and cosmonauts feel floating around their spaceship while circling the earth at 17,500 miles per hour?
I found myself dissociating occasionally from the present tense, forgetting where I was. But I was happy to read about the families the astronauts left behind and the way they felt watching the Challenger blow up on live television when they were children. The lack of present-time plot worked for me because of the rich, albeit fleeting, interiority we get from each of the astronauts.
“Everything, everything is turning and passing.” Nothing happens, but everything happens.
Exquisite prose
In this interview with
, author Samantha Harvey says, “I don’t think it’s polished prose I want so much as honest prose, something written from the bones that enters into the bones.”You could say these words enter into the bones. The dissonance between the meaning of the words and the imagery they convey is what had me reading so feverishly — and by this I do not mean fast. It took me five days to read this small book because I kept stopping, rereading, and reorienting myself.
An example of the discrepancy between what we usually think a word means and how Harvey cleverly bends it (emphasis my own):
Up now and diagonally across China’s great mountains, the faint smudge of rust that is the extraordinary autumn bloom of the Jiuzhaigou Valley and then the Gobi Desert in seeming plainness, except in looking closer there are the fearless brushstrokes of a painter who sees in sand the movement of water and sees in brown bolts of duck-egg mauve lemon and crimson, and casts the arid shades of oil spill, and makes of canyons nacreous shells.
I have never in my life read descriptions like that. I only ever want to read descriptions like that.
Social commentary
The earth these astronauts and cosmonauts are soaring around is wounded. A typhoon keeps coming in and out of view as they orbit. They wonder what will come of those in the typhoon’s path. The Italian astronaut thinks of the Filipino family he met on his honeymoon. Later, the all-knowing narrator brings us to that family while Pietro is still circumnavigating the globe, looking down at the changing earth.
Without saying we are destroying our planet, we read how we are destroying our planet, our beautiful planet with the “smooth, crisp bonbon of ice that marks Alaska. A cloud-free confection of crackable white.”
In orbit 11, Harvey drops hints of destruction:
We think we’re the wind, but we’re just the leaf. And isn’t it strange, how everything we do in our capacity as humans only asserts us more as the animals we are. Aren’t we so insecure a species that we’re forever gazing at ourselves and trying to ascertain what makes us different. We great ingenious curious beings who pioneer into space and change the future, when really the only thing humans can do that other animals cannot is start fire from nothing. That seems to be the only thing — and, granted, it’s changed everything, but all the same. We’re a few flint-strikes ahead of everything else, that’s it.
In orbit 13, Harvey conjures a “cosmic calendar of the universe and life, with the Big bang happening on January 1st.” On March 16th, the Milky Way forms. The earth comes about in August. The day after, its moon.
“Christmas Day, though Christ’s not yet born — 0.23 billion years ago, and here come the dinosaurs for their five days of glory before the extinction event that wiped them out.” The dinosaurs left in their absence a vacant spot: “Wanted — land-dwelling life forms, no time-wasters, apply within, and who should apply but the mammalian things, who quicksharp by midafternoon on New Year’s Eve had evolved into their most opportunistic and crafty form, the igniters of fire, the hackers in stone, the melters of iron, the ploughers of earth,” and on it goes, hitting on the gobblers of pills and the splitters of hairs, the predators of everything, until we get to “the lacking for love, the longing for love, the love of longing, the two-legged thing, the human being.”
That’s us, the two-legged fire-starting predator of all.
We exist now in a fleeing bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summery burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast.
After the narrator’s digression, the astronauts wake. Is it day? Is it night? They return to sleep in their hanging sleeping bags, their arms stretched out zombie-like in front of them. The typhoon hits land before the astronauts wake up.
Orbital’s combination of structure, extremely underlineable prose, and poignant social commentary kept me moving moving moving, like the six in the ISS. Like the people down below on earth facing the typhoon.
“A human being was not made to stand still,” Harvey says.
Orbital does not let you stand still.
I mentioned I was unable to underline the library’s copy of Orbital and I’m happy to report that halfway through reading the novel, I stumbled upon a tiny book exchange and found a copy below a bunch of nonfiction titles. In writing this essay, I was able to go back and revisit the beginning, mark up what I loved, and find myself floating once again inside the beautiful, untethered novel.
What are you reading? What are you underlining?
What I’m reading: I Watched you From the Ocean Floor, a debut collection of short stories by Erin Cecilia Thomas coming out July 2025 with Modern Artist Press.
What I’m underlining: [From I Watched you From the Ocean Floor]: “I saw endless worlds in her face, and wondered where she had been.”
Love, Kolina
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Screenwriter John Truby coined this term in his 2007 book, The Anatomy of Story.
I respect the review. I appreciated the craft of Harvey’s poetry, and indeed I have never encountered such majestic descriptions of the planet. However, I found the narrative repetitive and devoid of tension, mainly because there isn’t really a plot to speak of. I also found the characters thinly drawn and I couldn’t ultimately care about any of them. For these reasons I don’t think the book works as a novel.
I read this book at the very beginning of last year on a cross-country flight and it was a perfect surprise of a reading moment.