“Orbital” by Samantha Harvey Wins 2024 Booker Prize

The prize recognizes the best novel written in English and published in Britain or Ireland, and comes with a cash prize of 50,000 pounds, or $64,000

Orbital by Samantha Harvey has received the 2024 Booker Prize.

The book, which PEOPLE reviewed in the Nov. 4 print issue and the New Yorker also called "the strangest and most magical of projects," has already been widely recognized for its contemplative themes and eloquent writing. It came out in paperback in the U.S. on Oct. 29.

Harvey's novel follows "the drifting perspective of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they navigate bereavement, loneliness and mission fatigue," a statement from The Booker Prize Judges reads.

Related: National Book Foundation Announces the Longlist for the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction

The novel captures the astronauts' complexities through the lens of a single day.

"Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts — from America, Russia, Italy, Britain and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below," a press release from Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, reads.

Orbital is also the winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize for Literature, a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and was shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.

The Booker Prize, bestowed on an novel written in English and published in Britain or Ireland, is awarded yearly and comes with a cash prize of 50,000 pounds, or $64,000. According to the Booker Prize site, the prize winner "can expect a dramatic increase in book sales."

The Boston Globe's Wendy Smith writes, “Samantha Harvey’s meditative novel portraying life aboard a spacecraft contains on almost every page sentences so gorgeous that you want to put down the book in awe ... A thrilling book, filled with marvel at the beauty of creation.”

Guardian simply renders the novel "an Anthropocene book resistant to doom."

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From Bath, United Kingdom, Harvey is the author of five novels — Orbital, The Western Wind, Dear Thief, All Is Song and The Wilderness, which won the Betty Trask Prize — and one work of nonfiction, The Shapeless Unease. Her books have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award and the James Tait Black Prize, as well as longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize. She teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey is available now, wherever books are sold.