In January, a box of books was delivered to my house, the first of many to arrive, with a steadiness that would at times feel overwhelming. I was about to spend the year as a Booker judge.
All my life I have dreamed of having swathes of time filled with nothing but reading. Yet as I stared at that first tranche of books, my overriding feeling was apprehension. Awarding a prize with the power to transform literary history, as well as the winner’s career, isn’t a task to take lightly. Plus, I’d been warned that each judge would be required to read more than 150 books over seven months; a diet, it seemed to me, with a high chance of leaving me feeling force-fed and unable to stomach reading a novel ever again.
The reading was indeed relentless. From January to July, the pressure to keep up with it colonised my thoughts while the books themselves colonised my house. I read at every chance I got and, yes, I did read every book (the question I’m asked most often); though I’ll confess that in the interests of time I was grateful whenever I came across a short novel, or a terrible one. I read like I did when I was a teenager, voraciously, and all the time – something I haven’t had the luxury of doing since I gave birth to my first child. But above all, what distinguished this reading experience was the edifying company I kept, in the form of my fellow judges: the artist and writer Edmund de Waal, writer Yiyun Li, Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan and musician Nitin Sawhney. I began to read with their voices in my head, as if they too were colonising my thoughts. That chorus shaped my reading, made it more interrogative but also more sensitive. Over the course of the year, what had always been an inherently private act began to feel deeply communal.
Our year was subdivided by more than books. In February came the news that Yiyun’s son, James, had died. In March, we learned of Nitin’s heart attack and emergency surgery; in April, that Justine’s father had passed away. Inexpressible sorrows, that could have fractured our shared sense of purpose. Yet, as Yiyun said, literature was still a place where we could meet and talk. In impossible circumstances, we continued to read, and to discuss what we had read.
Only in retrospect do I see that the shortlist that emerged from our discussions was dominated by themes of escape and retreat, and that many of the books took place in cloistered settings, both literally – in Charlotte Wood’s masterful Stone Yard Devotional, the protagonist leaves everything behind for a life of atheistic contemplation at an isolated convent – and metaphorically – in James, Percival Everett’s miracle of interiority, escape is found in the life of the mind. Held by Anne Michaels is an interstitial contemplation of love and grief that at times seems to retreat into its own negative space, as if searching there for a kind of solace. The acerbic narrator of Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake defects from the world by degrees with beautifully sardonic effect, while in Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, the central characters’ obsession with one another envelops them in eroticism as well as unstable ideas of home, amid experiences of post-war dispossession.
In the wake of everything that had happened, it felt at times as though we judges were like the six astronauts in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, sealed into the sheltered space these books were building around us. So perhaps it is no surprise that when we emerged from that space to choose our winner, asking ourselves which book we most wanted to press into the hands of as many readers as possible, we voted unanimously in favour of Orbital. In offering us the perspective of those astronauts observing the Earth from the International Space Station, it had pulled us as far away as possible from our planet, with the strange and utterly compelling effect of neutralising earthly concerns while at the same time throwing them into the starkest relief.
Orbital is such a small book, but it seemed as though all of life was in it. And even from such a distant, hermetic vantage point, it felt achingly intimate. In my copy, I’ve scribbled notes between the lines of text (a sure sign a book has grabbed me by the throat). One of them reads: “This is a book we need now, but it may also be a book we’ll need forever.” I can think of no higher recommendation.
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Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Vintage Publishing, £9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.