NYU Reads

Orbital (2023) by Samantha Harvey is our NYU Reads selection for 2025-2026. 

Photo credit: Tracey Friedman

For every one day on earth, the four astronauts and two cosmonauts in Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital circle the earth sixteen times; from their space station, they swiftly circle the globe, looking back at Earth, experiencing “a day of five continents and of autumn and spring, glaciers and deserts, wilderness and warzones.” The “whip-crack of morning arrives every ninety minutes.” These astronauts are here for nine months: by the time they descend, they will have orbited Earth more than four thousand times. What might we understand about ourselves and others when we move at these kinds of speeds, and at this kind of distance? How does our understanding of place—earth, nation, culture—change? What about memory, or love, or time? As Harvey writes, it’s not that we have new thoughts, but “old thoughts born into new moments.” The astronauts and cosmonauts—American, Japanese, British, Italian, Russian—exercise, clean, dream, remember, but most of all, they monitor: their own bodies, molds, plant roots, forty resident mice, cultures of heart cells, cabbages and dwarf wheat, and the Earth, photographed over and over again, from every angle. Meticulously researched and lyrically rendered, Harvey’s novel is a call to step back, take perspective, and achieve deeper understanding. Orbital is a meditation on what it means to progress: observation by observation, reflection by reflection, accelerated day by accelerated day. Her novel helps us see our homes and lives—and our own orbits—anew.