★已授權法、西2國語文

A novel combined the excitement of space adventure with the weight of human dilemmas.

When Jane and her husband Raùl boarded the Lionfish, a ship taking a small group of settlers to a new planet that only their grandchildren may ever see, they agreed to the mission less out of idealism or desperation than a nebulous disappointment with Earth’s dwindling prospects.

The ship, they soon find, has its own disappointments in store, and after Raùl dies two years into the mission, Jane is left to navigate the increasingly claustrophobic spacecraft with two kids on her own. When Jane learns she’s been re-partnered with Lionel by the ship’s leadership in the hope that she’ll produce more children, she does her best to defy the policy and what starts as an act of personal resistance sets her on a path of not-entirely-intentional civil disobedience.

At the behest of her headstrong teenage daughter Mags, Jane teams up with a former midwife, Gabriel, to teach a covert sex-ed class, something that puts Gabriel at great risk—as a trans woman posing as a man in order to abide the ship’s strictly enforced reproductive goals, Gabriel can’t afford to be caught breaking rules. Colluding with Mags, Gabriel, and surprisingly, even Lionel, Jane is slowly drawn out of her grief, and in community her tough exterior softens slightly.

When she finds a controversial book among Raùl’s possessions—a strange diary kept by a colonist on an icy moon that’s banned aboard the ship— she sees him more fully and finds joy in an underground bookclub he founded for the text. However, when a shocking, violent betrayal upends Jane’s world, a plan for retribution spirals out of hand and puts Jane and her loved ones in graver danger than she ever could have predicted. The long aftermath of Jane’s actions aboard the ship is revealed in a stunning coda, calling into question the goals and assumptions of the Lionfish’s entire mission.

 

Nathaniel Ian Miller is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and has been translated into five languages, and, most recently, Red Dog Farm. A former journalist for newspapers in New Mexico, Colorado, Wisconsin and Montana, he now lives with his family on a farm in Vermont.