Charlton, M: Voyagers

With the imaginative soul and propulsive storytelling of Station Eleven and The Ministry of Time, Voyagers is a profoundly human, thrillingly original and brilliantly ambitious literary debut about friendship at the end of the world. If the world was about to end, who would you want by your side? When the Signal - a mysterious transmission pulsing from the edge of the solar system - arrives, the world changes overnight. Planes are grounded, satellites fail, humanity holds its breath. And Alex realises there‘s no one he‘d rather be with at the potential apocalypse than Ana. Because when they were six years old, Ana and Alex were abducted by aliens. Or at least, that‘s what they told the rescuers who found them after their 36 hours missing in Palm Springs, and the story they stuck to as they became minor child stars. Now, as the Signal grows louder and the world devolves into chaos, the two race to meet each other for one final reckoning. VOYAGERS is a novel about friendship and family, celebrity and conspiracy, memory and mystery. It explores what it means to live by one story before, at last, having the courage to tell a different one. ‘In Voyagers, Meg Charlton explores the connections between memory, storytelling, and truth. Against the backdrop of a global crisis, her characters contend with the lasting pain and confusion of a personal crisis. This novel grapples with the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but even more so with the possibility of friendship that is generous and forgiving. A delightful and moving debut‘ Helen Phillips, author of Hum and The Need ‘Voyagers is a tender sweeping epic about the quest for the self. Meg Charlton asks, in elegant and compelling prose: ‘Can we escape the terrible events of our past or make of them what we will? And what happens to intimacy when we share a past but remember it differently?‘. At its heart, Voyagers is a story about storytelling - how it tears us apart and might bring us back together again‘ Taymour Soomro, author of Other Names for Love