Across the universe

Samantha Harvey won the Booker prize with a novel set in space. Yet, she says, Orbital is actually 'a celebration of Earth's beauty with a pang of loss'

- Lisa Allardice

Samantha Harvey very nearly gave up on her novel Orbital, which has just won the Booker prize. Set on the International Space Station (ISS) 400km from Earth, Orbital follows the day-to-day lives of four astronauts and two cosmonauts as they hurtle through the universe. She was a few thousand words in and suddenly lost her nerve. She felt she was trespassing in space. "I am so spectacularly not an astronaut," she laughs, when we meet for coffee the morning after the Booker ceremony. "I'm so unadventurous, so unaudacious, so impractical, cowardly, anxious. I would be terrible." After a few months of dabbling with other ideas, she opened the abandoned document on her computer by mistake. When she read it she found it had an integrity and pulse that drew her more than any of the other projects she was working on. "I thought, I shouldn't be afraid of this. If I can do it in a way that's different to the way astronauts write about their time in space, then maybe there's something here." So she climbed back in and achieved lift-off.

Described as both "this generation's Virginia Woolf" and "a kind of Melville of the skies", Harvey was the only British author on this year's Booker shortlist. Orbital, her fifth novel, is a beautiful, powerful and utterly original work of fiction.

It takes place over one day, but time is different in space, where "the whipcrack of morning arrives every ninety minutes". Each of the 16 chapters records a single orbit of Earth. Mundane tasks are set against the munificence of the universe. One of the toilets is always blocked. A super-typhoon is gathering over the Philippines. Each of the characters are given only slivers of backstory: Chie's mother has died; Anton has fallen out of love with his wife; Shaun longs for his.