Orbital: Winner of the Booker Prize 2024

the heart scraped hollow with craving, which is not emptiness in the least, more the knowledge of how fillable he is. The sights from orbit do this; they make a billowing kite of you, given shape and loftiness by all that you aren’t.

Now he doesn’t see a painter or princess or dwarf or monarch, he sees a portrait of a dog. An animal surrounded by the strangeness of humans, all their odd cuffs and ruffles and silks and posturing, the mirrors and angles and viewpoints; all the ways they’ve tried not to be animals and how comical this is, when he looks at it now. And how the dog i

the booming silence of everything else,

you might regard in wonder these men walking on the moon but you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn’t know when to stop, it doesn’t know when to call it a day, so be wary is what I mean though I say nothing, be wary.

The mind is in a dayless freak zone, surfing earth’s hurtling horizon.

Chie winks. Yes, Pietro, what would you do? Lie there, Pietro says. And dream of space.

They will reappear on the earth’s surface as strangers of a kind. Aliens learning a mad new world.

Maybe the whole nature of things is one of precariousness, of wobbling on a pinhead of being, of decentring ourselves inch by inch as we do in life, as we come to understand that the staggering extent of our own non-extent is a tumultuous and wave-tossed offering of peace.

And then the right side of the earth’s curve becomes a gleaming scimitar. Silver pours out and the stars are banished and the dark ocean turns to an instant dawn.