Forthcoming on July 20, 2027
Hogarth (NA)
Harvill (UK)
9798217154821
Available for preorder via:
Flotilla
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.
Praise for Flotilla
“Exquisite, dazzling . . . This brilliant, captivating debut is a tale of navigation: navigating life after Earth, navigating shame and loneliness, navigating communal existence in an environment as fragile as it is brutal. . . . Entrancing.”
—Tess Gunty, National Book Award–winning author of The Rabbit Hutch
“A gorgeous elegy of life on Earth, set among the stars . . . Emma Hine has given us a sweeping, propulsive mystery to orbit around the tender estrangement between two sisters and the result is mesmerizing. What do we owe our ancestors? What do we owe our descendants? Flotilla unfurls humanity’s most enduring questions with vivid lyricism and a profound tenderness.”
—Lily Brooks-Dalton, author of The Light Pirate
“Beautiful, frightening, and elegant, Flotilla is an expansive epic of generation ships, twisted politics, secrets, rebellions, and the hope of human survival. Hine uses the backdrop of centuries of deep space travel to great effect, creating a love song for Earth itself, people trying to save it, hope in darkness, and the deep yet thorny love between siblings. When we talk about world building, this is it, and to an impressive degree. A bold and ambitious accomplishment, Flotilla is a stunner of a debut.”
—Erika Swyler, author of The Book of Speculation
***
Sarabande Books
January 5, 2021
978-1-946448-68-2
Available for purchase via:
Stay Safe
★ Publishers Weekly Starred Review
Winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize
Finalist for the John A. Robertson Award
Finalist for the Reading the West Book Award in Poetry
“In this exuberant debut, Hine weaves a complex family narrative around the constant presence of a story-loving mother and three sisters.... This excellent work offers a prayer for the current calamitous moment.”
—Publishers Weekly Starred Review
“Simply said: this is the renewable energy we’ve been waiting for. So attuned are these poems to their introspective nature and terrors of the self, their wild narratives, and linguistic spells, this book begins to feel like its own solar farm: each page, a panel of skyshine and wonderments.”
―Major Jackson
“Emma Hine’s remarkable debut claims as its title an impossible injunction: stay safe. What does it mean to stay, to remain, to arrest a state of being that is fully immune to danger, which is to say, to living? Hine circles this impossibility in poems of dark lyricism, ones commanding our attention to the body at risk: its hidden danger zones, its collisions and impacts, its relentless hurtle forward. Like the speaker in these poems, we’re made to understand we’re ‘not strong, not / permanent, just holding.’ Stay Safe limns personal and collective griefs with searing insight, showing us how mythology and language can transmute fear and loss into something redemptive, something of strange beauty. This is a collection that is startling in its revelations and the latitudes it traverses, and Hine is a tremendous voice reminding us what it is to mark an existence and to endure.”
―Jenny Xie
“Emma Hine's debut collection Stay Safe is like a rumble strip alerting her readers to potential dangers ahead, awakening us to the ‘quivering systems of energy and grief’ we traverse. The coming-of-age poems ripple with ominous sexuality and an awareness of loss ahead. Family history is transformed into near fairytale, and vice versa. ‘Expect sometimes to be lonely,’ a mother says in one of many poems charged with both love and loss. Hine's gift for metaphor marks these quiet hallucinations and keeps them free of sentimentality even when they pulse with feeling: ‘Waves touch shore in little habitual apologies.’ Taken together and singly, these poems become ‘a torch into the tunnel-end of risk.’”
―Catherine Barnett