The Employees: a workplace novel of the 22nd century

Written by Olga Ravn and Hannah Curtis

Narrated by Martin Aitken

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare.

Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members alike complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew become strangely and deeply attached to them, and start aching for the same things—warmth and intimacy, loved ones who have passed, shopping and child-rearing, and faraway Earth, which now only persists in memory—even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.

Olga Ravn's prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.

• Language: Nederlands
• Publisher: Bookhug Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781771667913

Olga Ravn

Olga Ravn (b. 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. Her novel The Employees, translated by Martin Aitken, was nominated and shortlisted for numerous prizes, including the International Booker Prize and the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. She has also edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen’s texts and books and was involved in the recent revival of Ditlevsen’s work in English.