You know that sense of amazement when you gaze out an airplane window to the earth, or lie on the grass on a clear dark night and wonder at galaxies of stars? Orbital by Samantha Harvey is this sense taken to the extreme. It is a beautifully written meditation on the everyday and magnificence of life from the perspective of an astronaut. 

Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.

The story revolves around six astronauts as they circle the planet sixteen times in a cramped spacecraft. Each of the astronauts, from a variety of countries, are loosely drawn so we do not get to know them in a deep way. But we do learn about the minute of their roles on the ship, the effect of weightlessness on their bodies and what they must do to counteract it, and how it feels to live like this. We see and understand their birdseye view as they witness from space what is happening on earth  in some detail, from their spectacular but strange vantage point where time is bent and distorted.

The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.

A slim volume, Orbital is a poetic, immersive reading experience for which Harvey won the Booker Prize in 2024. The story left me with a sense of awe.

How are we writing the future of humanity? We’re not writing anything, it’s writing us. We’re windblown leaves. We think we’re the wind, but we’re just the leaf.