A few weeks back, Samantha Harvey came to talk in the splendid church of Sherborne Abbey about her splendid, little, and 2024 Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital.
I discussed the book in these pages shortly before it won the prize, how it winds its plotless story around us readers much as its inaction winds the international space station sixteen times around the Earth during twenty-four hours of flight.
Harvey’s visit to Sherborne came as the Abbey was hosting an exhibition of “Gaia,” including a giant globe suspended and rotating from the vaulting heights of the church, a setting that added perspective to the novel’s content, in which the space station itself feels like a metaphor for Earth itself.
I won’t repeat the substance of the book or my review, but I was intrigued by the answer Harvey gave to question from a member of the 300-odd people who filled the nave of the church. …
Read the rest of What makes a plotless novel work? (Orbital, coming around again) on Substack.
