Lifestock - Florian Egger

Aboard the interstellar vessel Oikos 5, a civilisation is crossing the dark toward a new world. The journey takes generations. The Company has made sure certain people will live to see it completed.

Noah has been alive for centuries. He is the ship's historian - ancient, habituated, quietly burdened by a past so long it has stopped feeling like one. He knows how the ship works. He knows what is required of him. Tomorrow, it is his turn.

Lillie is a teacher in the lower colonies. This morning, two guards were waiting outside her classroom. They told her it was something good. They told her not to worry.

She is nine months pregnant, and she has just been escorted - for the first time in her life - into the part of the ship she was never supposed to see.

These two people will never meet. What connects them is something neither of them will say aloud, in a system built on the assumption that the people who bear its cost will never be told what it is.

Lifestock is a novel about the distance between knowledge and ignorance, between centuries and a single day, between a life preserved and a life that has just begun. It is told in two voices moving toward the same moment from opposite ends of the same ship - one who understands exactly what is coming, and one who does not.