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Reading lists

Where to start reading Samantha Harvey’s books

Image showing some of the best books of 2024, including Think Again, PATRIOT, The City and its Uncertain Walls and An African History of Africa

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Must-read books of 2024: A look back at the year’s most exciting releases

The Western Wind

Samantha Harvey is the author of the novels Orbital, The Wilderness, All is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind and a work of non-fiction, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. Orbital was the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, and her other work has been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award, the Women's Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness was awarded the Betty Trask Prize. She is a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

FROM THE AUTHOR OF 2024 BOOKER PRIZE WINNING ORBITAL 
 
15th century Oakham, in Somerset; when a man is swept away by the village's river, an explanation has to be found: accident, suicide or murder? 
 
The village priest, John Reve, is privy to many secrets in his role as confessor. But will he be able to unravel what happened to the victim, Thomas Newman, the wealthiest, most capable and industrious man in the village? And what will happen if he can’t? 
 
Moving back in time towards the moment of Thomas Newman’s death, the story is related by Reve – an extraordinary creation, a patient shepherd to his wayward flock, and a man with secrets of his own to keep. Through his eyes, and his indelible voice, Harvey creates a medieval world entirely tangible in its immediacy. 
 
'A rich and sumptuous delight' DAILY TELEGRAPH 
 
'Astonishing… A rollicking mystery and a profound meditation on faith and existence’ OBSERVER

Orbital

Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share

Edmund de Waal, Chair of the 2024 Booker Prize judges

In this slender novel, Harvey seems to have encompassed all of humanity… It is an extraordinary achievement

Gorgeously poetic… I was knocked out. It’s also surprisingly funny… One of the most original novels I’ve read this year

Harvey beautifully evokes the wonder and fragility of our planet and its inhabitants. An uplifting book, in every sense

In Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, six astronauts circle the world 16 times. Gliding through Harvey’s technicolour prose is an equally frictionless experience

Orbital is the rarest of things, a book that satisfies both my lifelong obsession with space travel and my hunger for sentences and paragraphs that demand to be read and reread… My goodness this novel is beautiful

One of our most consistently surprising novelists rips up the rulebook again… A boldly imaginative meditation on time and the nature of existence

Orbital is entirely original, a serenely beautiful and intelligent creation

This genius novel… Asks big questions about humanity and the fragility of our lives… A short yet exquisite read

In outer space the author hits on the pure swirlingness that her previous works seem to aspire to. The characters’ thoughts mix and flow with the colours and light… Sumptuously written

A slender, gleaming novel… Weaving a line of philosophical enquiry through her luminous prose has become something of a trademark for Samantha Harvey

One of the most original novels I’ve read in a long time. It’s bold, it’s scintillating and it’s gloriously imaginative… [it] puts humanity into a brave new perspective

A slim, profound study of intimate human fears set against epic vistas of swirling weather patterns and rolling continents

Samantha Harvey is one of Britain’s most fascinating writers and this novel is characterized by her sense of awe

Stunning… The beauty of the prose engages the reader fully… An uplifting book

In contrast to the bleak apocalyptic tone of much contemporary climate fiction, Orbital’s luminous descriptions remind us of the beauty at stake when humanity plays fast and loose with our single, and singular, blue marble

Harvey’s impressively researched, poetic novel carries a powerful ecological message. Above all, thought, it’s a brilliantly imaginative account of life with the vastness of the cosmos just outside your window

Mesmerising… Harvey blends prose of poetic beauty with a clarion call to take responsibility for where we live… Orbital deserves to propel Harvey to far greater recognition

A gorgeous novel… An intensely charged reading experience, sustained by the sensory thrill of Harvey’s imaginative attention to detail

I loved this short novel, which explores the inner-lives of astronauts as they orbit a troubled, unstable planet. There’s little in the way of plot but the writing is so exquisite, the sense of awe and beauty so well-achieved that I tore through it in a single sitting

Orbital is as beautiful as it is profound

Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven

One of the most beautiful novels I have read in a very long time

This is such a beautiful book you have to adjust your readerly heart to take it all in... It is an awe-inspiring and humbling love letter to Earth and those who reckon with the gift of it

Six astronauts on a space station are working, sleeping, and watching the world go by. They think about typhoons, algal blooms, seascapes, cities at night, Velázquez, frog calls, fried eggs, family. Orbital is a lush description of the gorgeous earth, and a broad-minded, level-headed, affectionate take on what goes on down here

Orbital is a magnificent, thunderous work and yet so brief, so fleeting. It is an elegy to planet Earth in all its splendour and fragility. Exquisitely well-written, it confirms Samantha Harvey as a singular talent

Nathan Filer, author of The Shock of the Fall

Orbital is one of the most beautiful and poignant novels I have read this year… There is something profoundly compelling about this short novel

A gorgeous song of praise from on high, a hymn sung in starlight to celebrate mankind's courage and endeavour

Otherworldly… Gorgeously written and offers a intriguing perspective on the human race’s treatment of our planet

Orbital could be her best yet… It is sensual and poetic and concerned with the granular experiences of the individual

An exquisite little novel... Weaves lyrically between the minds of the characters and the aesthetics of Earth as seen from above

Compelling... Orbital is a hopeful book and it studies people who act on their hope. It’s an Anthropocene book resistant to doom

A fascinating glimpse inside a home so few will ever see. Her lyrical prose skillfully contrasts the technicalities of space travel with the ever-present inspiration of the gleaming planet below... This slim novel is so much more than the sum of its parts. Luminous and profound, Orbital is hard to put down and even harder to forget

Lovely lyrical prose... This gorgeous meditation leaves readers feeling as if they’re floating in the same 'dark unswimmable sea'

Its meditative loveliness is a tonic [...] looking back with love and longing at faraway Earth.

A slim but beautifully rich novel. You could read it over and over, just as watching a sunrise never gets dull… its prose is both scientifically precise and transcendent

Orbital is as accessible and educational as the best of popular science. It’s a feat almost as astonishing as the existence of the ISS

Orbital meditates on the glorious fragility of human life and culture… a gentle and warm exploration of what it means to be human in an environment in which human beings were not designed to live

A beautiful, powerful and utterly original work of fiction

[Obital] skilfully and ambitiously exposes is the human cost of space flight set against the urgency of the climate crisis

Orbital…is a delight… [it has] some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read this year

This luminous novel… [explores] the joys and sorrows of being human, and [is] a love letter to our unique planet

A beautiful, sublimely written, hopeful book

A gorgeous 160-page novel, this year’s Booker Prize winner would be right at home in any stocking

Startling, compelling, humane, this is my book of the year

Samantha Harvey’s gorgeously wrought Orbital, a new and profound perspective on the Earth in all its beauty and fragility and a vital read in an age of environmental degradation and territorial violence

A beautiful book, small but ever so perfectly formed, and easy to disappear inside

Well-researched and convincing… a richly poetic description of what it is like in orbital space

One of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’ve encountered in a long time

A short read, but a beautifully expansive one, offering a perspective that is epic yet intimate, heartbreaking yet awe-inspiring

Like its gorgeous vision of the Earth, each line, each word of this precious book sings with wonder: it is a hymn to the planet that holds us

A masterpiece, compelling you to look from the gutter to the stars – reading it is like taking DMT… Orbital is a monumental work in a novella-sized bite

I admire Orbital even more than the rest of Harvey's work... I don't think I've read anything else with such love for its characters and such clarity about the state of the planet, and I was deeply grateful for the novel's refusal of despair or cynicism

Indubitably intelligent, Harvey's prose is also quite simply ravishing ... This generation's Virginia Woolf

I loved reading it before I fell asleep every night - it seemed to give my sleep resonance and poetry. What a beautiful book

Tessa Hadley, praise for THE SHAPELESS UNEASE

[A] remarkable book ... Harvey writes with hypnotic power and poetic precision about - well, about everything

Mail on Sunday, praise for THE SHAPELESS UNEASE

Beautifully rendered, deeply affecting, thoroughly thoughtful

New York Times, praise for THE WESTERN WIND

**WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE** 
**THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 
 
'A slim, profound study of intimate human fears set against epic vistas' GUARDIAN 
 
'Stunning... An uplifting book' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
Life on our planet as you've never seen it before 
 
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. 
 
Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. 
 
The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity? 
 
'Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share' Edmund de Waal, Chair of the 2024 Booker Prize judges 
 
*A BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, SPECTATOR, DAILY MAIL AND MAIL ON SUNDAY*

A Year of Not Sleeping

The Shapeless Unease

A poignant, urgent memoir about insomnia; the non-fiction debut by one of our finest novelists

**Featured on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read** 
 
 'A profound meditation on language and loss and time, and on how we construct ourselves through stories. And it's painful. And it's beautiful. And I love it.' NATHAN FLIER 
 
 Samantha Harvey's insomnia arrived, seemingly, from nowhere; for a year she has spent her nights chasing sleep that rarely comes. She's tried everything to appease it. Nothing is helping. 
 
 What happens when one of the basic human needs goes unmet? For Samantha Harvey, extreme sleep deprivation resulted in a raw clarity about life itself. Original and profound, The Shapeless Unease is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and grief, and the will to survive. 
 
 'A delight to read... ineffably rewarding' OBSERVER 
 
 'Easily one of the truest and best books I've read about what it's like to be alive now, in this country' MAX PORTER 
 
 
 'How can a book about a sensual deprivation be so sensuous and so full? ... it seemed to give my sleep resonance and poetry. What a beautiful book.' TESSA HADLEY

[A] remarkable book… [The Shapeless Unease is] an extraordinary journey, but it’s also mesmerising. Harvey writes with hypnotic power and poetic precision about – well, about everything: grief, pain, memory, family, the night sky, a lake at sunset, what it means to dream and what it means to suffer and survive.

A delight to read… suffused with the sense of a timeless fable… ineffably rewarding.

Urgent and wild, but also dazzling in its precision. This is what it must be like to try to keep hold of a brilliant mind that is threatening to unspool… a dark, seductive book about fear and madness and their allure… Reading The Shapeless Unease can feel not unlike dipping into strange, unchartered waters: it is by turns bracing and soothing, with a dark undertow and glimmers of light at the surface, and one emerges from it with an altered perspective, a sense of time having slowed down.

Samantha Harvey's dazzling, dizzying trip through the nightmare world of the sleepless...[is a] wondrous little book... a treasure trove of material… The Shapeless Unease is also one of the best books you will find about swimming. And its wonders.

Intricately intriguing… astonishing… [The Shapeless Unease is] a particular joy. It moves between topics with ease, and yet at its heart it is an emotional book… I haven’t read a book which is quite as clear about being a writer.

An engrossing vision of how our lives are knit together - day to day, night to night, and thought to thought.

The Shapeless Unease is a merciless and self-mocking memoir in which Harvey shows us the insomniac’s universe of “edgeless expanse”… Writing should take us to places we wouldn’t otherwise go, and Harvey invites us to open our eyes in the darkness and feel the tiger in the room.

The Shapeless Unease contains many beautiful and poignant passages about the human will to keep on living… [and] Harvey’s imagery casts a spell.

What a spectacularly good book. It is so controlled and yet so WILD. One of the best books I’ve read about writing. One of the best books I’ve read about swimming. One of the best books I’ve read about mourning. And easily one of the truest and best books I’ve read about what it’s like to be alive now, in this country.

How can a book about a sensual deprivation be so sensuous and so full? Gritty with particulars, concrete and substantial even when it is most philosophical and far-reaching. I loved reading it before I fell asleep every night – it seemed to give my sleep resonance and poetry. What a beautiful book.

The Shapeless Unease captures the essence of fractious emotions – anxiety, fear, grief, rage – in prose so elegant, so luminous, it practically shines from the page. Harvey is a hugely talented writer, and this is a book to relish.

This book felt enormous to me, mercurial, devastating, seeming to grapple with the nature of everything in a manner so compelling it is impossible not to be swept along. A book to return to again and again.

I have valued Samantha Harvey's company through her memoir of insomnia, The Shapeless Unease. Harvey's description of not sleeping as a kind of assault feels utterly true.

A small miracle of a book. Reading it feels like its own kind of lucid dream … You would imagine a book written in such circumstances would have a hazy quality, but in fact its clarity of expression is startling. It's a fireworks display. It's also a profound meditation on language and loss and time, and on how we construct ourselves through stories. And it's painful. And it's beautiful. And I love it. Samantha Harvey is the most exceptionally gifted of authors, and here she demonstrates that she can literally do anything.

I am still shuddering, almost, from the beautiful, beautiful writing and its broken, angry, vibrant demand – a dare almost – to accept life, and brave it, with all it brings.

A creative account of a life with little sleep… Readers looking for their own cure will instead find an erudite companion to help them through the dark times.

It's funny, sad, wry, always worrying away at the mystery of sleep and its absence and finding endless new angles so that the whole has something of the quality of those waking dreams that haunt the insomniac and are her private country.

A slim, intense memoir about her own year-long experience of nocturnal unrest… a torture Harvey describes with a combination of desperation, wry humour and — despite the scarcity she is subjected to — a deeply felt sense of life’s abundance… [her] prose…glows off the page: an exacting inquisition of the self leading to imperfect peace.

After a run of brilliant novels…Harvey offers this silver of non-fiction… It’s a cut above the usual seasonal crop of health books.

Daily Telegraph, *Books to Look Our For in 2020*

[Harvey is] brilliant on words and the nature of writing.

[With The Shapeless Unease] Harvey has certainly proved that insomnia, as much as any of the more obviously nasty diseases, might be as worthy a subject of literature as love, battle or jealousy…her book rises to that level.

[A] bravely exposing deep dive into the emotional murk of her [Havey’s] restless mind….[it] reveals…the irresistible writerly impulse to pin experience to the page.

[The Shapeless Unease] reads like a dream sequence… Even reading this made me feel dizzy… [Harvey is] a vigorous, eloquent writer… she conveys the way sleeplessness takes you into the death zone of life.

Mesmerising…at times, bitingly funny… [The Shapeless Unease is] an engrossing portrait of the fragility of identity and coherency in the grip of insomnia. I hadn’t read Harvey before this, but her facility with language here captivated me and I’ll be seeking out her novels next.

Urgent and full of arresting images and insights.

[The Shapeless Unease] is littered with sharp insights expressed in exquisitely lucid prose but is as amorphous as its title suggests.

It’s a claustrophobic, enlightening, moving, existential treatise on sleep, insomnia and death. And it’s funny, too.

I wish I had saved The Shapeless Unease to read in isolation but Samantha Harvey’s book about insomnia, time, death and so many unknowable things is a blessing to have in lonely times. It is a profound and stunning book but funny, too.

A beautiful, jagged little book about insomnia and so many unknowable things: life and death, Buddhism, and how language alters our thinking. But I was most struck by its form and structure.

[Samantha Harvey's] cerebral, startlingly clear account of somehow pulling through [from insomnia] carries an electric charge and meditates on not only the mystery of sleep but also writing, swimming and dreams.

A profound and stunning book but funny, too.

[The Shapeless Unease] is beautifully crafted and its achievement makes itself more apparent on a second reading.

A masterpiece, so good I can hardly breathe. I'm completely floored by it.

This book seems appropriately messy-haired and wild-eyed... Anyone who has lain awake the night before a big test will recognize such manic flourishes. Harvey captures the 4 a.m. bloom of magical thinking; stories proliferate within stories... To read Harvey is to grow spoiled on gorgeous phrases.

**FROM THE AUTHOR OF 2024 BOOKER PRIZE WINNING ORBITAL** 
 
‘Easily one of the truest and best books I’ve read about what it’s like to be alive now, in this country’ Max Porter 
 
Sleep. Sleep. Like money, you only think about it when you have too little. Then you think about it all the time, and the less you have the more you think about it. It becomes the prism through which you see the world and nothing can exist except in relation to it. 
 
Samantha Harvey’s insomnia arrived, seemingly, from nowhere; for a year she has spent her nights chasing sleep that rarely comes. She’s tried everything to appease it. Nothing is helping. 
 
What happens when one of the basic human needs goes unmet? For Samantha Harvey, extreme sleep deprivation resulted in a raw clarity about life itself. Original and profound, The Shapeless Unease is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and grief, and the will to survive.

All is Song

A fiercely intelligent and moving second novel from the author of the acclaimed The Wilderness.

A fine study of the nature and strength of family ties and the morality, or otherwise, of conforming where it matters

This beautifully written composition does that rare thing, of provoking free thought, while scrutinising the far-reaching repercussions of such rebellious activity

Harvey's slow, intense thoughtfulness feels positively Woolfean at times. She thinks deeply, and writes beautifully about these thoughts.

This is a novel of ideas that also creates believable characters and explores complex relationships. Harvey's prose is graceful and unhurried, full of sharp observation and moments of subtly understated pathos

There's still something compelling in the way Harvey resists the easy and the obvious. The result is a novel of both depth and defiance

A moving novel about family duty and friendship set against a London backdrop of national unrest

Deftly controlled and exquisitely measured

How would Socrates get on in 21st century Britain? This is the question at the heart of Samantha Harvey's ambitious second novel

The beauty of the intense plot lies in its economy. The novel is so finely tuned, it is hard to find any passage where she is not fully in control. No matter how dramatic the events she describes, they never drown the ideas being discussed.

Harvey's talent is in the details of both characters and relationships that seem trivial but are telling ... Harvey is a master of language, adept at both Wildean one-liners ... and more profound expression

In this Socrates-like story Samantha Harvey examines a dramatic sibling relationship whilst questioning the place of philosophy in modern life

Lovely observations on a sibling relationship

Graceful and full of sharp observation and moments of understated pathos

**FROM THE AUTHOR OF 2024 BOOKER PRIZE WINNING ORBITAL** 
 
Leonard is alone and rootless, returning to London after his father's death. He moves in with his distant brother William and his family, hoping to renew their friendship but learning to drop his expectations of brotherhood. William is a former lecturer and activist who now runs informal meetings with ex-students. He is defiantly unworldly and forever questioning. 
 
When a young student follows William's arguments to a shocking conclusion, it appears William has already set his own fate in motion. Against a backdrop of tabloid frenzy, Leonard can only watch as William embraces the danger in the only way he knows how, which threatens to consume not only himself, but his entire family.

The Wilderness

An extraordinary debut novel by a young writer of remarkable gifts

Brave and intelligent...a mesmerising work

A stunning composition of human fragility and intensity

An extraordinary dramatisation of a mind in the process of disintegration ... Brilliant - read it now, before it scoops up all the prizes

Touches a resounding chord of melancholy. The author, whose debut this is, is very talented

This is a finely written ode to memory, identity and love

a forensic examination of loss and misunderstanding, a paean to the vital force of stories, and an incredibly moving look at a sword of Damocles that hangs over us all

The imagined experience of dementia is intricately, cleverly woven

Harvey uses her precise and unostentatious style to full effect

A treat for literature lovers who appreciate complexity in their novels and aren't afraid to deal with tough topics

Harvey's novel bravely reimagines the horrors of Alzheimer's from within the ever-narrowing parameters of an architect's mind

Closer to Virginia Woolf's meditative novels than anything else I can think of

A forensic examination of loss and misunderstanding, a paean to the vital force of stories, and an incredibly moving look at a sword of Damocles that hangs over us all.

Harvey shows her remarkable powers of empathy and her no less remarkable literary skill. To write about a disordered mind is to court the danger of creating a work that is itself disordered. But from start to finish her control is absolute....I can think of few more distinguished literary debuts in recent years

Moving, convincing, adroit- it is a remarkably accomplished first novel and a beautiful jacket

Harvey's is certainly the outstanding fictional debut to have come my way this year

Impressive first novel [which] plays some original tricks with narrative

Deeply original and captivating...The lyrical power of these shifting and competing narratives is matched by the absolute emotional realism of Jake's own desperate plight: his shame and anger and impotence are devastatingly recorded. And yet this is not a depressing novel, but rather one so full of urgent life that it rouses even as it terrifies.

Many novels have documented the trials of living with dementia, but this mind-bending debut throws us straight into the skewed recesses of a sufferer's brain... An exhilarating trip, but for the thought that this is a place some of us might visit one day.

**FROM THE AUTHOR OF 2024 BOOKER PRIZE WINNING ORBITAL** 
 
It's Jake's birthday. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's. 
 
As the disease takes hold of him, the key events of his life shift, and what until recently seemed solid fact melts into surreal imaginings. Is his daughter alive or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? There was a cherry tree once, and a yellow dress, but what do they mean? Is there anything he'll be able to salvage from the wreckage? 
 
From the first sentence to the last, The Wilderness holds us in its grip. This is writing of extraordinary power and beauty.

Samantha Harvey

FROM THE AUTHOR OF 2024 BOOKER PRIZE WINNING ORBITAL 
 
In the middle of a winter’s night, a woman wraps herself in a blanket, picks up a pen and starts writing to an estranged friend. 
 
In answer to a question you asked a long time ago, she writes, and so begins a letter that calls up a shared past both women have preferred to forget. 
 
Without knowing if her friend, Butterfly, is even alive or dead, she writes night after night – a letter of friendship that turns into something more revealing and recriminating. By turns a belated outlet of rage, an act of self-defence, and an offering of forgiveness, the letter revisits a betrayal that happened a decade and a half before, and dissects what is left of a friendship caught between the forces of hatred and love. 
 
‘A glorious, sensuous, grown-up novel, intelligent and passionate’ TESSA HADLEY 
 
‘Ravishing… Harvey offers an incandescent vision of hope and acceptance’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Samantha Harvey

Books by Samantha Harvey

Articles featuring Samantha Harvey

The Penguin books that challenged our view of the environment

Where to start reading Samantha Harvey’s books

Must-read books of 2024: A look back at the year’s most exciting releases

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