What is the title of your latest release?
VOYAGERS
What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
Two six-year-olds, Alex and Ana, mysteriously vanish for two days in the late 1990s. The incident is interpreted as an alien abduction and makes the two kids a) famous and b) inseparable, until their divergent beliefs about the truth of their experience tear them apart as teenagers. Now adults, they reunite when the world seems to be on the verge of actual, global first contact with aliens.
How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
The setting really came first – one of the earliest images I had in mind was of a woman running barefoot through the desert around Joshua Tree. The other locations of New York and Los Angeles and Las Vegas all trickled in slowly. But the desert was what inspired the entire project.
Would you hang out with your heroine in real life?
If I’ve done my job right, who wouldn’t!? Ana is magnetic. I was interested in writing a character who was instantly charming, but we also see the ways in which that charm can be a burden or a barrier to intimacy, both for herself and the people around her. To bring it back to the original question, I wanted to explore the loneliness of being the person everyone else wants to hang out with.
What are three words that describe your hero?
Smart. Self-doubting. Sensitive.
What’s something you learned while writing this book?
I learned the delightful fact that Jimmy Carter once saw a UFO! This was long before he was president or even governor. I was so taken with the story that I ended up devoting a small section to it in the novel. Carter never seemed to believe that it was an alien craft he’d seen that night, but he stayed very open-minded, generally, to the idea of extraterrestrial life; it was under his administration that we launched the Voyager mission that inspired the title of my book. There’s a beautiful line from Carter in the letter that he sent up with the probes: “This is a present from a small distant world a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” It makes me cry every time I read it. There’s so much hope and humility and humanity contained within those words and I really sought to channel that spirit in the novel.
Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
I have a very strange process. I tend to fiddle endlessly with the first 10,000 words or so of a project and then, suddenly, finish the whole thing in a single burst. Only after that will I go back and edit – but that is actually my favorite part of the whole process. I love editing and am not afraid to rip something up, root and branch, if it means getting closer to the heart of the original idea.
What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
An ice cream cone on a summer night.
Describe your writing space/office!
I write anywhere that I can! I wrote VOYAGERS on trains, planes, picnic tables – basically wherever I could prop up my laptop. I am not very precious about my writing space. The only thing I need is a tight deadline and a Word document.
Who is an author you admire?
Eleanor Catton, for her range and restraint.
Is there a book that changed your life?
THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY by Alan Watts.
Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published). Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
I was in the parking lot of Moody’s Diner in Walodoboro, Maine when I got the first call that an editor was interested in VOYAGERS. My agent had sent the book out just a few days prior and I really had not expected to hear that quickly! It was such an incredible moment.
What’s your favorite genre to read?
Whatever inspires me to pick it up. I am genre and era-agnostic!
What’s your favorite movie?
So hard to pick just one! I used to work in film and I’m definitely a “cinephile” so watching movies is a beloved pastime. But I think I’d have to pick Mulholland Drive. Not only do I love that film but I am also a huge admirer of David Lynch, both for the power of his work and for his ethos as an artist.
What is your favorite season?
Spring.
How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
With my wonderful husband and as many friends as possible!
What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
I am always months-to-years behind on TV shows and podcasts, but a recent film I loved was Perfect Days directed by Wim Wenders, and a novel I loved was WAITING ON A FRIEND by Natalie Adler.
What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
I just got back from Japan, so I have to say: Japanese!
What do you do when you have free time?
See movies, see art, and push my body! I am a late in life skier and intermittent athlete. Finding the edge of my courage and endurance brings me a lot of satisfaction.
What can readers expect from you next?
Another genre-blending novel, only this time with a gothic twist.
VOYAGERS by Meg Charlton
When the Signal—a mysterious transmission pulsing from the edge of the solar system— arrives, the world changes overnight. Planes are grounded, satellites fail, and speculation abounds. With many believing this could be first contact with extraterrestrial life, humanity holds its breath. But for Alex, a thirtysomething lawyer who’s spent years distancing himself from the unexplainable, the Signal feels deeply personal—the opening of an old wound.
Decades ago, Alex and a girl named Ana both vanished for thirty-six hours while on vacation near Palm Springs. When they returned, dazed but unharmed, the six-year-olds’ account of their experience had all the hallmarks of an alien abduction. The media frenzy that followed made them famous, and the long months of child stardom, of talk shows and sitcom cameos, forged a seemingly unbreakable bond between them—until the mystery behind their disappearance began to tear them apart.
Now, with the world on edge and the Signal growing stronger, Alex is drawn back to the one person who might have answers. Ana—now a professional advocate for experiencers of extraterrestrial contact—is leading a retreat near Palm Springs, a stone’s throw from the site of their childhood disappearance. As the former best friends tentatively reunite, what starts as a quest to confront the reality of their original experience becomes a larger reckoning with friendship, faith, family, and truth itself—what it means to see the stories we tell ourselves for what they really are.
With the imaginative scope and propulsive storytelling of Station Eleven and The Ministry of Time, Voyagers is a thrillingly original and brilliantly ambitious literary debut about friendship at the end of the world.
Women’s Fiction Friendship | Science Fiction | Fiction Literary [ Harper, On Sale: June 16, 2026, Hardcover / e-Book / audiobook, ISBN: 9780063441217 / eISBN: 9780063441231 ]
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About Meg Charlton
Meg Charlton is a writer based in New York City. Her debut novel VOYAGERS is forthcoming from Harper. Other work has appeared in The Yale Review, Slate, Lux, Atlas Obscura and Vice, and the anthology Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us. Her writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and covered in Indiewire, Above the Law, and Australian National Radio’s Future Tense. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and teaches at Sackett Street Writers. She is also the co-author of the Substack Self-Helpings.
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