'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey Wins the 2024 Booker Prize
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The 2024 Booker Prize winner is here!
The prestigious literary prize, awarded to a novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland, was given to Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Edmund de Waal, the chair of the judges, described the novel as a "beautiful, miraculous novel," adding, "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." Harvey is the first female author to win the Booker in five years, and Orbital is the first book set in space to win the Booker.
For the first time in the Booker Prize's history, the shortlist included five women authors. "When it comes to setting, the six novels on this year’s shortlist are spread far and wide, from 220 miles above the earth to a cave network beneath the French countryside, 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 early 1960s," the Booker Prize's official announcement reads. "The books explore big and timely issues: the ways in which we hide our real selves from those around us, and the contested nature of truth; the way traumatic histories – personal and collective – shape and restrict us, and follow us however far we go.Is there a single theme that unites all six books? In their own unique ways, they all explore the gravitational forces exerted on us by the place we call home."
Here, a guide to the six books on the 2024 Booker Prize shortlist:
James: A Novel
Percival Everett's James is a reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of an enslaved runaway man. The judges said it is "a powerful, genre-defying, revisionist exploration of slavery, identity and the pursuit of freedom that subverts all expectations and further establishes Percival Everett as a masterful storyteller."
Orbital
Samantha Harvey's Orbital follows a 24-hour period in the lives of six astronauts on the International Space Station. "By positioning the entire planet within a single narrative frame, Orbital blurs distinctions between borders, time zones and our own individual stories. This is a vantage point we haven’t encountered in fiction before, and it is infused with such awe and reverence that it reads like a love letter, an act of worship," the judges wrote.
Creation Lake: A Novel
Creation Lake, one of T&C's best books of fall 2024, is about Sadie, a spy-for-hire who infiltrates an environmental activist group in rural France.
From the judges: "It’s quite something to wrap a thought-provoking novel of ideas into a page-turning spy thriller, and to achieve a narrative voice that is so audaciously confident – and then subtly undercut it. This is a political novel on many levels: it includes radical leftists, utopianists, a reclusive guru obsessed with Neanderthals, the shadowy forces of ruthless capitalism. Through it all Kushner examines how the individual interacts with, and disrupts, ideologies. That could sound dry – but her prose is so juicy, her narrator so jaunty, her worldbuilding so lush, that it’s anything but."
Held: A novel
Held begins in the trenches of World War I and follows the soldier's family and descendants through the near future. "There are very few books that can achieve a pitch of poetic intensity sustained across a whole novel," the Booker Prize judges write. "Through broken stanza-like paragraphs and chapters that move between different members of the family across a century, Held achieves the feat of being deeply moving and asks the question ‘Who can say what happens when we are remembered?’ with tenderness. "
The Safekeep
In The Safekeep, Isabel, a Dutch woman living in rural Overijssel 15 years after World War II, falls for Eva, her brother's girlfriend. "This novel is quietly devastating. Within a perfectly ordered Dutch landscape and a household where everything seems to be as serenely accounted for as a still-life, two women’s relationship with a house and its possessions becomes a story of the Holocaust. It is unique to find a book that is able to navigate this through the lens of love," the judges write.
Stone Yard Devotional
Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional is set in a convent in rural Australia, following a woman who is feeling despair over climate change. "The novel is set in a claustrophobic environment and reveals the vastness of human minds: the juxtaposition is so artfully done that a reader feels trusted by the author to be an intellectual partner in this exchange, rather than a passive recipient of stories and messages," the judges write.
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