NYU Reads brings the NYU community together around a single common reading, chosen by a University committee made up of faculty, student, and administrator representatives. Building on our undergraduate schools’ first-year reading programs, NYU Reads extends this dialogue beyond NYU Welcome and opens it up to the entire University community.

The 2025-2026 NYU Reads selection is Samantha Harvey's novel Orbital.

For every one day on earth, the four astronauts and two cosmonauts in Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital circle the earth sixteen times; from their space station, they swiftly circle the globe, looking back at Earth, experiencing “a day of five continents and of autumn and spring, glaciers and deserts, wilderness and warzones.” The “whip-crack of morning arrives every ninety minutes.” These astronauts are here for nine months: by the time they descend, they will have orbited Earth more than four thousand times. What might we understand about ourselves and others when we move at these kinds of speeds, and at this kind of distance? How does our understanding of place—earth, nation, culture—change? What about memory, or love, or time? As Harvey writes, it’s not that we have new thoughts, but “old thoughts born into new moments.” The astronauts and cosmonauts—American, Japanese, British, Italian, Russian—exercise, clean, dream, remember, but most of all, they monitor: their own bodies, molds, plant roots, forty resident mice, cultures of heart cells, cabbages and dwarf wheat, and the Earth, photographed over and over again, from every angle. Meticulously researched and lyrically rendered, Harvey’s novel is a call to step back, take perspective, and achieve deeper understanding. Orbital is a meditation on what it means to progress: observation by observation, reflection by reflection, accelerated day by accelerated day. Her novel helps us see our homes and lives—and our own orbits—anew.

Orbital was named the 2024 Booker Prize Winner. 

NYU Health Sciences Library provides print copies to employees of NYU Langone Health through our Document Delivery Service. (If you have not created a Document Delivery account, you must create one through the link first.) Then sign in through the link to request any of the titles below.  You may pick up at the library or request delivery to your home address. Happy reading!

Access through your local pubic library for book copies, digital or print.  New York Public Library offers a free online library access to people aged 13 or older who live, work, attend school, or pay property taxes in New York State. Sign up for an NYPL digital library card today.  Read online through the Kindle or Libby app.