Books by Samantha Harvey
Samantha Harvey is a writer whose debut novel, The Wilderness, is about a man suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. She has lived in Ireland, New Zealand and Japan, writing, travelling and teaching, and in recent years co-founded an environmental charity. She has a master’s degree in philosophy. The Wilderness, her first novel, won the Betty Trask Award.
Orbital
by Samantha Harvey
🏆 Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize
Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the first book set in space to win the Booker Prize, follows a team of astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
“Orbital by Samantha Harvey is an obliquely political and beautifully strange narrative in which the message is never in your face – rather, diffused from above in a way that is at once mesmerizing and troubling. This is a novel that asks questions about an earth lined with its own human markings of war, industry, climate change; written with such a delicate touch that it is only afterwards that you understand the activating power of the book you’ve just held in your hands” Read more...
The Best Political Novels of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Fiction
“The Western Wind gives us an in-depth immersion into this small, rural village. It’s the only one of the books that I chose that is set in a village. It’s an exceptionally powerful description of a locale…What Harvey does is very clever: she tells the story backwards. It starts with a certain day and then it goes back in time through different days. It was billed as a whodunnit, though I actually don’t think that’s the best way of describing this book. It is much more about atmosphere and a particular world and uncovering the details of different characters’ motivations and ideas rather than solving what happened.” Read more...
Best Medieval Historical Fiction
Marion Turner, Biographer
Interviews with Samantha Harvey
The best books on Mental Illness, recommended by Samantha Harvey
The author discusses books on mental illness, explaining the conditions that keep us sane and the effects of removing them. Recommendations include Sartre, Coetzee, and John Bayley on Iris Murdoch
Interviews where books by Samantha Harvey were recommended
Best Medieval Historical Fiction, recommended by Marion Turner
The medieval era in Europe lasted a millennium and saw massive social change and technological innovation, as well as calamities like the Black Death. That makes it a great period for historical fiction, offering a glimpse of a past that was very different from our own lives, and yet can resonate with the present. Here Marion Turner, Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, recommends some of her favourite historical novels set in the Middle Ages and explains why she finds them so compelling.
The Best of Historical Fiction: The 2019 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist, recommended by Katharine Grant
The best historical novels are those so immersive and natural in tone that their period setting is a ‘by-the-way,’ says Katharine Grant, the novelist and judge for the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. Here she discusses the six brilliant books that made the 2019 shortlist.
The Best Political Novels of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Fiction
The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction is awarded annually to “outstanding novels and collections of short stories, first published in the UK or Ireland, that illuminate major social and political themes, present or past, through the art of narrative.”
Booker Prize-Winning Novels
The winner of the 2024 Booker Prize was Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, the first novel to win the prize that’s set in space. Below, our list of all the Booker Prize-winning novels of the last twenty years.
