Orbital

Harvey's Booker winner compresses six astronauts orbiting the ISS into a single day and barely 130 pages, deliberately withholding the machinery of plot — the astronauts' individual backstories surface only in fragments, and the characters' lives barely interact with each other at all. What the book substitutes for incident is the physical fact of orbiting Earth sixteen times in twenty-four hours, watching continents and weather systems scroll past a window, which becomes its own kind of structure: repetition standing in for narrative arc. It's a book that asks to be read for its sentences and its vertigo rather than its story, and reviewers split accordingly between those who found that a legitimate formal risk and those who wanted more to hold onto.