Fetal Position: A Novel

The author of the Good Morning America Book Club pick The Fortunes of Jaded Women returns with a speculative novel in which a burnt-out corporate employee joins a start-up that promises domestic ease—but as women begin to disappear, she must confront the violent cost of complicity.In the near future, “high-value” intelligent women are recruited by a mysterious start-up called Hatch to become traditional wives to combat the historically low birthrate and the supposed male loneliness epidemic. In return, you’ll no longer have to work and you’ll get a subsidized house, land, and a robot butler that’ll do all domestic labor for you. You simply trade in your corporate labor for child labor—through being inseminated with a male match’s sperm. Lena Do is one of those women. She’s been stuck in corporate America for far too long. She hates her life. She has no nuclear family, no cousins, and no support system. The world is shrinking, and it’s not just the men who are lonely. So when she receives an invitation to Hatch, she’s wooed by their promises of connection and happiness. But when women start disappearing and dying around her, she races against the clock to uncover the truth behind the company before she’s trapped forever—all the while trying to discern whose side her robot butler is really on. With biting social critique, Fetal Position examines survival, complicity, artificial life, bodily autonomy, and the chilling reality of an increasingly data-driven world that optimizes who deserves love—and who deserves to live. Read more