Like a Black Mirror episode that feels all too terrifyingly real, this speculative novel from the author of the Good Morning America Book Club pick The Fortunes of Jaded Women follows a burnt-out corporate employee who joins a start-up that promises domestic ease—but as women begin to disappear, she must confront the violent cost of complicity.

In a near future plagued by plummeting birthrates and a male loneliness epidemic, a mysterious start-up called Hatch recruits “high-value” women with a seductive promise: trade your grueling work life for subsidized security, a beautiful home, and a robotic butler to handle every domestic burden.

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 the pristine, utopian facade begins to crack when the women around her vanish, and has no choice but to race 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.

Carolyn Huynh is a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. She loves writing about acerbic women who never learn from their mistakes but yearn for joy. Her debut novel, The Fortunes of Jaded Women, was a Good Morning America book club pick and picked as one of the best books of the year by NPR. A homegrown Californian, she resides in Los Angeles with her partner, her daughter, and her demon girl dog. Fetal Position is her third book. When she’s not writing, Carolyn daydreams about having iced coffee on a rooftop in Ho Chi Minh City.