Fetal Position

by Carolyn Huynh

Genres: Feminist; Literary Fiction; Dystopian

Synopsis

From the author of the Good Morning America Book Club Pick The Fortunes of Jaded Women comes a heart-pounding speculative novel in which a burnt-out corporate woman joins a startup that promises domestic ease and meaning through enforced motherhood—but as women begin to disappear, she must confront the violent cost of complicity before the state-sanctioned solution claims her body for good.

Set moments in the near future, “high-value” intelligent women are recruited by a mysterious start-up called Hatch to become traditional wives, to help combat the historically low birthrate and the male loneliness epidemic. The incentives? You’ll no longer have to work your corporate job, you’ll get a subsidized house, land, and a robot butler that’ll do all your errands and domestic labor for you.

The catch? You simply trade in your corporate labor for child labor—through being inseminated with organic sperm through a male match.

Women in this timeline no longer care for children or marriage, and if they choose to have a child, there’s an option of being inseminated neo-vitro with lab-grown, artificial sperm. The men really are dying out. Hatch believes they’ve privatized a solution to this, but providing incentives upon incentives, and specifically recruiting lonely, corporate women.

Lena Do is one of those women. She’s been stuck in corporate America for far too long—even though she’s exceptionally good at her job, she hates her life. The loneliness of the capitalistic milieu and grind is her entire world. She’s lonely, but not in the sense that we know. Like many people around her, she has no nuclear family, no cousins, no support system. Family trees have shrunk the past few generations—and she has residual resentment towards her late mother, the great scientist, Gemma Do, who had her neo-vitro. Lena has no biological father, but the mystery of why her mother chose to have her has haunted her ever since childhood.

When Lena gets an invite to Hatch, she leaves behind everything she’s ever known to join a cause she’s been taught her whole life to hate. But when women start disappearing and dying around her, she races against the clock to uncover the truth behind the company before her insemination is successful, and she’s trapped forever.

With biting social critique, Fetal Position examines survival, complicity, and the chilling reality of what happens when government policies decide who deserves love—and who deserves to live.

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 256