Introducing the 2026-2027 Common Book
KU Reads 2026-2027 Selection
A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space—not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. 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. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live.Profound, contemplative and gorgeous, Orbital is a gift—a moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet.
Orbital is the 2026 - 2027 academic year KU Reads selection! Copies are currently available only to KU faculty and instructors. Student copies will become available in the Fall 2026 semester.
Faculty and Instructors, request your copy below.
Samantha Harvey
Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels and one work of non-fiction. Her latest novel, Orbital, takes place on a space station and is an account of a single 24-hour day in low earth orbit. Orbital won the Booker Prize 2024 and the Hawthornden Prize, and is nominated for the Orwell Prize and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.Her other novels have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, the Walter Scott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Baileys Prize, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and the HWA Gold Crown Award. The Western Wind won the 2019 Staunch Book Prize, and The Wilderness was the winner of the AMI Literature Award and the Betty Trask Prize.
She is a Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University in the UK.
