This week I’ve been hugely enjoying Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the winner of this year’s Booker Prize. Harvey lives in our fair county and teaches creative writing ‘just 30 minutes from Wiltshire’ as some of our rival local newspapers might put it (see last week’s column) or Bath, as the rest of the world might describe it.

Orbital itself is a delight. It revolves, quite literally, around six astronauts in a space station, orbiting the earth over a 24-hour period. From here, afloat with thoughts, fears and memories, they witness our planet in both its natural beauty and the scars left by mankind: the lights on the border between India and Pakistan; ‘every retreating or retreated or disintegrating glacier’. Harvey’s descriptions of the planet are sumptuous.

The book’s timing, with the United Nations Climate Change Conference currently meeting in Baku, couldn’t be sharper.

As well as some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read this year, Harvey’s book also stands out for its length. Or rather, the lack of it. Clocking it at 136 pages, the book is the second shortest ever to win the Booker (a bonus point if you were able to name Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore as the shortest, four pages briefer).

I read a lot of books and brevity, it is fair to say, is not in fashion. JK Rowling’s Robert Galbraith books began at around four hundred pages a novel. Now they’re nudging a thousand pages a pop. It’s not just fiction where length is increasingly the norm: this year’s best picture at the Oscars, Oppenheimer, clocked in at three hours: Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen’s stadium sets push towards the four-hour mark.

Yet sometimes in the arts, less is more. Orbital is not the only short novel to delight readers in recent years: Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and Natasha Brown’s Assembly are three other contemporary miniature masterpieces. Rather than suggesting a lack of anything to say, their shortness shows precisely the opposite.

Some writers have worked this out over the years. ‘Brevity is the soul of wit,’ Shakespeare once wrote. ‘Get in, get out, don’t linger,’ was Raymond Carver’s writing advice. ‘I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time,’ Mark Twain is regular credited as saying (though the phrase itself probably originated with French philosopher Blaise Pascal).

Encapsulating what you want to say in fewer words is twice as hard as having as long as you want to get to the point.

Orbital’s brief success might encourage both better writing and be better for the planet too – an axe being taken to extraneous words rather than the trees chopped down to accommodate them.