As the world unravels under a mysterious signal, two childhood friends reunite to confront their shared past and the possibility of an extraterrestrial future.

VOYAGERS
by Meg Charlton
Harper, Winter 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Voyagers is the story of the lifelong friendship between Alex and Ana, narrated by Alex, now in his early 30’s. He’s a lawyer, lives a quiet life. And then the Signal – a narrow-band transmission broadcasting a sequence of pulses from somewhere near Pluto, for which no government claims responsibility – convinces the world that we’re about to make First Contact with aliens. Alex is primed to believe this: when he was 6 years old he went on vacation with his family to Palm Springs, met Ana (vacationing with her mother next door), and during a sleepover the two were abducted by aliens. Or at least, that’s what they told the rescuers who found them after their 36 hours missing, and the story they stuck to as they became minor child stars. As teenagers, their divergence in belief about what “really” happened severed their friendship.

Now, Alex realizes there’s no one he’d rather be with at the potential end of the world than Ana. She has made her living as an ‘experiencer advocate,’ leading retreats for those who’ve experienced extraterrestrial contact, and is coincidentally about to lead one in Palm Springs; Alex will go out to meet her. As the Signal grows louder and starts affecting electronics, grounds planes, and the world devolves into chaos, the two race to meet each other for one final reckoning to uncover what really happened to them as kids – and the reader learns whether there are “really” aliens out there. 

Meg Charlton is a writer and screenwriter based in New York City. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in VICE, Slate, The Yale Review, Atlas Obscura and Lux, and been anthologized in the collection Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us. Her short fiction has been optioned for film and TV and is currently in development with 3 Arts Entertainment and S/B Films, represented by Alice Lawson and Jason Klorfein at Gersh. She received her MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College where she was the recipient of the Creative Writing Award.