UK author Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Booker Prize for Orbital. The novel was Harvey’s fifth, and is a story about a single day aboard the International Space Station.
On this year’s shortlist, five of the six novels were written by women – a first in the competition’s 55-year history.
The prestigious award honours fiction in English written by authors of any nationality published in the UK and Ireland, and is chosen by a panel of judges from the literary world.
Authors from five countries appeared on this year’s shortlist, including the first Dutch writer to be shortlisted, the first Australian in 10 years, as well as British, Canadian and American authors. Two of the authors have been shortlisted previously.
With a diversity of content, the list features stories which transport readers around the world and beyond Earth’s atmosphere: from the battlefields of the First World War to a spiritual retreat in rural Australia; from America’s Deep South in the 19th century to a remote Dutch house in the 1960s; from the International Space Station to a cave network beneath the French countryside.
According to the judges, among other things, the shortlisted books explore the gravitational pull of home and family; the contested nature of truth and history; and the extent to which we reveal our real selves to others.
Orbital was the top-selling book on the shortlist of six finalists and has sold more copies than the past three Booker Prize winners combined.
Harvey wrote the novel while stuck at home during the pandemic watching footage of the earth in low orbit. She likened the experience of the astronauts on the space station to being stuck in lockdown.
Find out more about Orbital and the other shortlisted books below:
Orbital by Samantha Harvey – Winner
Six astronauts rotate in the International Space Station. They are there to do vital work, but slowly they begin to wonder: what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?
Judges’ comments
‘In an unforgettable year for fiction, a book about a wounded world. Sometimes you encounter a book and cannot work out how this miraculous event has happened. As judges we were determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share. We wanted everything.
‘Orbital is our book. Samantha Harvey has written a novel propelled by the beauty of sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the Earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones. With her language of lyricism and acuity Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.
‘All year we have celebrated fiction that inhabits ideas rather than declaiming on issues, not finding answers but changing the question of what we wanted to explore. Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share.’
James by Percival Everett
A profound meditation on identity, belonging and the sacrifices we make to protect the ones we love, which reimagines Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Judges’ comments
‘A masterful, revisionist work that immerses the reader in the brutality of slavery, juxtaposed with a movingly persistent humanity. Through lyrical, richly textured prose, Everett crafts a captivating response to Mark Twain’s classic, Huckleberry Finn, that is both a bold exploration of a dark chapter in history and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. With its virtuosic command of language and moral urgency, James stands as a towering achievement that confronts the past while holding out hope for a progressive future, cementing Everett’s deserved reputation as a literary sensation.’
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
A woman is caught in the crossfire between the past and the future in this part-spy novel, part-profound treatise on human history.
Judges’ comments
‘Sadie Smith – not her real name – is an FBI agent turned spy-for-hire, whose latest mission is to infiltrate a commune of eco-activists in rural France. She’s an extraordinary creation: sharp-minded, iron-willed, accustomed to moving fast and breaking things.
As she investigates the group, she hacks into emails from their guru, a shadowy eccentric who has withdrawn from modernity into the ancient caves that dot the landscape; he has some beguiling ideas about the role of Neanderthals through history. What’s so electrifying about this novel is the way it knits contemporary politics and power with a deep counter-history of human civilisation. We found the prose thrilling, the ideas exciting, the book as a whole a profound and irresistible page-turner.’
Held by Anne Michaels
In a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence ignite and re-ignite as the century unfolds.
Judges’ comments
‘The first few pages of this brief kaleidoscopic novel from the author of Fugitive Pieces may seem forbidding, yet every member of the judging panel was transported by this book. Michaels, a poet, is utterly uncompromising in her vision and execution. She is writing about war, trauma, science, faith and above all love and human connection; her canvas is a century of busy history, but she connects the fragments of her story through theme and image rather than character and chronology, intense moments surrounded by great gaps of space and time. Appropriately for a novel about consciousness, it seems to alter and expand your state of mind. Reading it is a unique experience.’
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes – and the legacy of one of the 20th century’s greatest tragedies.
Judges’ comments
‘Set in the early 1960s in the Netherlands in an isolated house, The Safekeep draws us into a world as carefully calibrated as a Dutch still-life. Every piece of crockery or silverware is accounted for here. Isa is the protagonist – a withdrawn figure who is safeguarding this inheritance. When her brother brings his new girlfriend Eva into this household the energy field changes as we sense boundaries of possession being crossed, other histories coming into the light. We loved this debut novel for its remarkable inhabitation of obsession. It navigates an emotional landscape of loss and return in an unforgettable way.’
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
The past comes knocking in Charlotte Wood’s fearless exploration of forgiveness, grief and female friendship.
Judges’ comments
‘Sometimes a visitor becomes a resident, and a temporary retreat becomes permanent. This happens to the narrator in Stone Yard Devotional – a woman with seemingly solid connections to the world who changes her life and settles into a monastery in rural Australia. Yet no shelter is impermeable. The past, in the form of the returning bones of an old acquaintance, comes knocking at her door; the present, in the forms of a global pandemic and a local plague of mice and rats, demands her attention. The novel thrilled and chilled the judges – it’s a book we can’t wait to put into the hands of readers.’
