VOYAGERS

A mysterious extraterrestrial “Signal” sets off a global panic and brings two friends, who’d been abducted by aliens as children, back into each other’s orbit.

On vacation with his family in Palm Springs, California, Alex Whitman—a shy and lonely 6-year-old—is excited for his first sleepover with Ana Pincer, a girl his age staying in the vacation rental up the hill. Instead of having a normal sleepover, Alex and Ana go missing, only to reappear in the desert two days later claiming they’d seen a bright light and were attended by beings that communicated with them telepathically. Now it’s 30 years later, and after a childhood spent making appearances on network television and at UFO conferences, Alex and Ana are estranged. Alex is a lawyer in New York trying to hide from his history under a new last name; Ana is a Los Angeles–based “experiencer advocate” for those who believe they’ve made contact with aliens. When a Signal (which “quickly acquired the totemic Capitalization”) picked up from space causes fears to rise worldwide, Alex realizes he no longer wants to run from the mystery of what he experienced with Ana; he must return to her, to California, and to his past to find the truth. Aliens are having a zeitgeist moment in both pop culture and real-world politics, but they make for tricky subject matter. In lesser hands, this book might have been a schlocky story about chosen family or a hard-edged dystopian look at the way facing the unknown can bring out the worst in humans. But Charlton strikes just the right notes of smarts and warmth, and the result is an uncommonly confident debut novel.

Readers who miss Mulder and Scully’s lighthearted side should dig in—but there’s satisfaction here for anyone.