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.
Eve, the daughter of a renowned, tempestuous writer, is isolated in early motherhood when she runs into an enigmatic childhood friend she calls Demeter. Demeter’s daughter is unable to tolerate sunlight, and no doctors believe that the girl’s illness, which comes to be known as Emily Syndrome, is real. But Eve believes, and even suspects that it is the fact that Demeter is a struggling, under-educated single mother that the medical system shrugs off her daughter’s unusual symptoms. Their captivating, reborn relationship revives Eve, then pulls her into a crisis that engulfs her town and even threatens her own family. Determined to help everyone she loves, Eve learns that when disaster hits, we might not all be heroes, but our own flawed selves can be everything we need. 
When she’s having sex with her boss, Iris likes to have the lights on so he can see how much younger she is than his wife. She likes watching her colleagues eat unhealthy lunches at their desk while her stomach aches with emptiness. She likes coasting at work knowing she’s going to land a big promotion anyway.
Newly single Meadow Liu is house-sitting for his friend, artist Selma Shimizu, when he stumbles upon The Masquerade, a translated novel about a masked ball in 1930s Shanghai. The author’s name is the same as Meadow’s own in Chinese, Liu Tian–a coincidence that proves to be the first of many strange happenings. Over the course of a single summer, Meadow must contend with a possibly haunted apartment, a mirror that plays tricks, a stranger speaking in riddles at the bar where he works, as well as a startling revelation about a former lover. And when Selma vanishes from her artist residency, Meadow is forced to question everything he knows as the boundaries between real and imagined begin to blur.
Dolly Maunder is born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society’s long-locked doors are just starting to creak ajar for women. Growing up in a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, Dolly spent her restless life pushing at those doors. A husband and two children do not deter her from searching for love and independence.