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.
“It’s a very poetic book. Samantha Harvey creates beautiful imagery. It gets into the lives of six astronauts from different countries: Russia, Britain, America, Japan, Italy. They are all reflecting upon their own lives through the prism of looking at the Earth from above. It’s very powerful in how it gives this beautiful overview. It’s meditative in lots of ways, but gives us insight into the lives of these very different characters that is very believable and interesting.” Read more...
The Best Novels of 2024: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Nitin Sawhney, Musicians, Music Critics & Scholar
“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.
Award-Winning Novels of 2024, recommended by Cal Flyn
If you struggle to keep abreast of notable new novels, it can be helpful to check the consult a list of winners of recent literary awards. The juries of major prizes often wade through dozens or even hundreds of submissions when they put together their shortlists, and are therefore well placed to offer informed recommendations. Here, we’ve put together an easy to consult round-up of novels that won big literary awards in 2024.
The Best Novels of 2024: The Booker Prize Shortlist, recommended by Nitin Sawhney
Every year, the £50,000 Booker Prize is awarded to a work of fiction newly published in English. We spoke to the composer Nitin Sawhney, one of this year’s judges, about their search for a shortlist, and why these six books—including the winning title, Samantha Harvey’s space station novel Orbital—are the best novels of 2024.
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.
