Flotilla: A Novel

A spellbinding debut novel about a young woman and her estranged sister, a fleet of decaying spaceships centuries from Earth, and the layers of conspiracy and moral complicity at the heart of human life

“Exquisite, dazzling . . . [a] brilliant, captivating debut." —Tess Gunty, National Book Award–winning author of The Rabbit Hutch

"A gorgeous elegy of life on earth . . . [and] a sweeping, propulsive mystery."—Lily Brooks-Dalton, author of The Light Pirate

My sister told me we were always meant to vanish.

Carina Loew, twenty-nine, hasn’t spoken to her sister Ursa in a decade. Instead, she has built a solitary life as a watcher on Tundra, a city-sized spaceship in the fleet that fled Earth centuries ago. Through her telescope she looks out onto the Flotilla’s other aging ships, sounding the alarm about cracked panels and further signs of imminent disaster. Some say it’s only a matter of time until all the ships come apart. Yet where is there to go? Humanity is alone in space, haunted by losses both distant and near: the mythologized landscapes of their former planetary home and the disappearance of Pacific and its one million inhabitants—an event still not fully explained after twenty years.

Now, on the twentieth anniversary of Pacific’s vanishing, a journalist threatens to reveal the terrible secret that changed everything for Carina and Ursa when they were children. But as this secret closes in, forcing the sisters to finally reconnect, Carina comes to understand that not everything about her world is as it seems. What she uncovers might tear the Flotilla apart—but it might also be their only chance for salvation.

Lyrical, propulsive, and wildly original, Flotilla is a story of sisterhood, grief, and the lengths we will go to make sense of our place in a vast universe—a remarkable debut from a dazzling new voice in fiction.