3.5 

The Employees

By Olga Ravn & Martin Aitken
The Employees by Olga Ravn & Martin Aitken digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

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

Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award

Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members 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 becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, 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. It was shortlisted for the the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. 

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The Employees Reviews

3.5
“what an interesting book. This one made me think a lot, about our relationships between each other, our relationships to objects, our relationships to ourselves, and our relationships with work. Stark. Distant. Abrupt. The strangeness of this book was so intriguing. The structure, the style, the plot, all of it pulled me in and made me think. This book was a strange work of art.”
“what a cool trippy book! very quick read (2ish hours) but really really great prose and i liked the ideas brought forth in the different memos. some were super self reflective and i really liked that. what does it mean to be human?”

About Olga Ravn

Olga Ravn (born 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. In collaboration with Danish publisher Gyldendal she edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen’s texts and books that relaunched Ditlevsen’s readership worldwide. Her novel The Employees was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 2021, and The Wax Child was on the longlist for the Booker International Prize and the shortlist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Translation in 2026.

 

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