Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Booker Prize for Orbital, a slim novel that follows six astronauts through a single day - sixteen sunrises - aboard the International Space Station. It's the shortest book to win the prize in its history, and the first built around space travel. The rest of the shortlist ranged from Percival Everett's Mark Twain reimagining to Rachel Kushner's espionage thriller, making for one of the more genre-varied fields in recent memory.
Winner
Orbital
Samantha Harvey
Six astronauts, sixteen orbits, one day - Harvey turns the mundane choreography of life in space into something closer to prayer. The shortest novel ever to win the Booker, and a strong case for restraint.
Also shortlisted
James
Percival Everett
A retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective, sharp and often very funny about the gap between the voice he performs for white characters and the one in his own head.
Held
Anne Michaels
A fragmented, multi-generational novel that moves across a century of war and loss - dense and poetic rather than plot-driven.
Creation Lake
Rachel Kushner
An American spy infiltrates a group of French eco-radicals in this dry, funny, unusually cerebral take on the espionage novel.
The Safekeep
Yael van der Wouden
A postwar Dutch household drama that turns into a slow-burn queer romance and a reckoning with what - and who - was displaced during the war.
Stone Yard Devotional
Charlotte Wood
A woman retreats to a monastery in rural Australia; a plague of mice and the return of a dead nun's bones unsettle the quiet she came looking for.