Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021
The near-distant future. Millions of kilometres from Earth.
The crew of the Six-Thousand Ship consists of those who were born,and those who were made. Those who will die,and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery,the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them,and human and humanoid employees alike start aching for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Shopping and child-rearing. Our shared,far-away Earth,which now only persists in memory.
Gradually,the crew members come to see their work in a new light,and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether they can carry on as before and what it means to be truly living.
Structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission,Ravn s crackling prose is as chilling as it is moving,as exhilarating as it is foreboding. Wracked by all kinds of longing,The Employees probes into what it means to be human,emotionally and ontologically,while simultaneously delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.
Publisher: Lolli EditionsISBN: 9781999992880Weight: 150 gDimensions: 180 x 120 x 12 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'This beautiful and moving novel,set in a workplace - a spaceship some time in the future - is by turns loving and cold,funny and deliberately prosaic; capable of building a sense of existential horror one minute then quotidian comfort and private grief the next. In deceptively simple prose,threaded on a fully achieved and ambitiously experimental structure,it asks big questions about sentience and the nature of humanity. And about what happiness might be.'- 2021 International Booker Prize judges
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