Samantha Harvey wins the Booker prize for “Orbital”

TEN YEARS AGO, when eligibility for the Booker prize expanded from Commonwealth authors to Anglophone authors of any nationality with a book published in Britain, teeth were gnashed and hands wrung. Some worried that judging would become impossible, because the authors and their subjects were so disparate. Others, a bit gutlessly, worried that Americans would dominate, which they have not done: just two prizes, to George Saunders and Paul Beatty, have crossed the Atlantic. The bookies’ favourite this year, Percival Everett, was an American who went home empty-handed.