New Animal
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
‘Ella Baxter’s debut novel is drenched in sex and death . . . there’s also much love . . . An intense, viscerally affecting book, with the quotient of tenderness to violence in an equal scale.’ Sydney Morning Herald
Amelia is no stranger to sex and death. Her job in her family’s funeral parlour, doing make-up on the dead, might be unusual, but she’s good at it. Life and warmth comes from the men she meets online – combining with someone else’s body at night in order to become something else, at least for a while.
But when a sudden loss severs her ties with someone she loves, Amelia sets off on a seventy-two-hour mission to outrun her grief – skipping out on the funeral, running away to stay with her father in Tasmania and experimenting on the local BDSM scene. There she learns more about sex, death, grief, and the different ways pain works its way through the body.
It takes two fathers, a bruising encounter with a stranger and recognition of her own body’s limits to bring Amelia back to herself.
Deadpan, wise and heartbreakingly funny, Ella Baxter’s New Animal is a stunning debut.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Australian writer Baxter debuts with a raw and mordant story of a woman processing her grief, sexuality, and family relationships. Amelia Aurelia is in her late 20s and working as a cosmetic mortician at her stepfather Vincent's mortuary, where the steady stream of corpses keeps her constantly aware of mortality. She deals with this by sorting her emotions into two "boxes," one for the living and one for the dead, and copes most nights by pursuing hookups. When her mother unexpectedly dies, Amelia becomes desperate for connection. Her older brother leans on the man and woman in his throuple for comfort, while Vincent turns to the bottle. Instead of staying for the funeral, Amelia flies to Tasmania to stay with her biological father and explores BDSM with random dates. She also takes a new funeral home job and processes her grief. Baxter delicately balances the emotional heft of the situation with dark humor (Amelia, asked how she identifies while on the way to a kink club, responds, "Human woman, tired, sad, on a date with you, not wholly sure what a sadist is") and finds clever ways to push Amelia toward coming to terms with her limits. It adds up to a convincing look at a young woman's path toward self-acceptance.
