LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE ARE FLOATING IN SPACE...

"A radiant explosion of a novel." -JAMIE QUATRO ORBITAL A NOVEL SAMANTHA HARVEY

- SCOTT GARCEAU

There's a Filipino connection running through Samantha Harvey's thin novel Orbital, which won the 2024 Booker Prize and takes place on the orbiting International Space Station. From up there, watching the weather patterns and swift cycling of night and day, the six characters in Harvey's novel—four men and two women, astronauts and cosmonauts from Japan, the US, Britain, Italy and Russia—go through their own orbits of wonder, reflection, isolation and separation from their planet.

All of them register concern about an impending typhoon set to sweep through the Philippines, and one, Pietro, recalls his own personal connection with a fisherman from Samar, silently praying for them all to get out of harm's way: "To those on the tiny eastern islands, just get out. To one particular fisherman and his family, Pietro thinks, get out now, get out yesterday. But get out where? And how?"

It's one of the points where these distant ponderers, caught up in daily activities to keep the ISS functioning, even as their own bodies become more brittle in space, actually seem to connect things back to the big blue marble they're orbiting.

"An astronaut and a fisherman," Pietro thinks. "What a collision of worlds. He came to dinner with his wife and charmed your children and cast a spell of wonder on your cardboard house as if he'd dropped in that afternoon from space itself."