The Employees: Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize - Softcover

Ravn, Olga

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1405976780 ISBN 13: 9781405976787

Publisher: Penguin, 2025

Synopsis

'I was obsessed from the first page to the last. A strange, beautiful, deeply intelligent and provocative investigation into humanity. The Employees is an alarmingly brilliant work of art’ Max Porter

On the Six-Thousand Ship, things have started to feel changed. Since bringing aboard a number of strange objects from a newly discovered planet, the crew – both human and humanoid – have begun to feel a yearning. They want to be near the objects, to feel them pressed against their skin, but they also all now feel a curious new hunger for home: Earth, that place many cannot even remember.

The Board of Directors are eager to understand more, and so instruct a commission to interview each of the employees. Those who are born dream of soil, the smell of warm asphalt, the sound of animals and birds. Those who are made know only what is programmed, and yet feel it deeply, truly. As their testimonies accumulate, a tapestry of longing and quiet rebellion emerges, blurring the lines between work and life, between human and machine.

The Employees was the breakout novel from one of the most celebrated authors in world literature, and is now seen as a masterpiece of twenty-first century literary science fiction. In stark, pristine prose, Olga Ravn forms a timeless meditation on productivity, pleasure and what the far-flung future might miss.

'Beautiful, sinister, gripping. A tantalising puzzle you can never quite solve.' Mark Haddon

About this title

About the Author

Olga Ravn (Author)
Olga Ravn is one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary authors. Her novel The Employees was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021, the Ursula K.Le Guin Prize and longlisted for the National Book Awards and the Dublin Literary Award. Her novel My Work won the Politikens Literature Prize in 2021 and led to changes in the country’s maternity rights. She has also written shorter pieces for the New Yorker, the Paris Review and Granta.

Martin Aitken (Translator)
Martin Aitken has translated numerous novels from Norwegian and Danish. He has received the PEN America Translation Prize and the National Translation Award in Prose, and his work has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the National Book Awards, and the Dublin Literary Award.

From the Back Cover

A novel detailing the interactions between human and android crew members aboard a futuristic spacecraft as they encounter and react to a series of mysterious alien objects.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1405976780
• ISBN 13: 9781405976787
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144