Georgetown Library Sunday Book Club: A monthly book club

Orbital , told over the course of 24 hours, follows six astronauts and cosmonauts from Japan, the United States, Britain, Italy, and Russia, four men and two women, aboard the International Space Station as they orbit Earth. In addition to detailing the official duties and tasks of the astronauts aboard the spacecraft, the novel also features their reflections about humanity and subjects including the nature or existence of God, the meaning of life, and existential threats such as climate change. Each chapter of the novel covers a single 90-minute orbit around Earth, with 16 orbits in the 24 hours. The novel won the 2024 Booker Prize and the Hawthornden Prize and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for imaginative fiction.