A Real Animal
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
An epic, transformative novel following a young woman as she navigates a series of three distinct romantic relationships, reckons with the false promise of family intimacy, and seeks connection with the sublime and natural worlds.
Lucy is a senior in college struggling to quell the effects of a sexual assault when she gets a glimpse into a different plane of existence — one that is more wild, physical, animal. Unable to shake the experience, she moves away from home, breaks up with her long-term boyfriend, stops speaking to her mother, and starts dating a dynamic man with a terrifying violent streak.
As she changes cities, friends, and partners, an otherworldly existential force thrums in the back of her mind. It urges her to reject the ordinary, but also reminds her that she is alone in the world. She feels it in the ocean while deep-sea diving, in the cold silences from her mother, in the unknowing gaze of the man she thought would be her soulmate.
We follow Lucy over the course of a decade, witnessing moments of both horrific pain and quotidian happiness. The years pass by seamlessly, bringing her to the edge of her twenties and back to an altered, barren version of her childhood home, where she must finally come to terms with the fear that being human might mean feeling alone, and wild, and unknowable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A young woman navigates her desires in the wake of a sexual assault in the propulsive and stunning debut from Atwood. When narrator Lucy is a college senior, she can't bring herself to touch her long-term boyfriend but has many casual liaisons with other men. She also briefly transforms—perhaps literally, perhaps not—into a leopard and causes alarm by scaling a tree on campus. A year earlier, she was raped during a summer abroad. Her parents, fearing for her mental health, take her home to Boston once the school year is out, before the graduation ceremony, but she soon leaves against their will to start a job at a casting agency in Indianapolis. There, she moves on from the leopard manifestation but retains a newfound awareness of her animal nature ("I know now something about fear that's not quite human, about predation that's different from what others might think they know, about why cats like lying out in the sun so much"). She also becomes enmeshed with Ellis, a lover with a cuckolding kink, even after he turns violent. The novel barrels through Lucy's 20s as she leaves and begins various jobs and relationships, and it builds toward a symbolic and surprising conclusion, in which she learns she can't run from her past. Readers will be held captive by Lucy's exciting voice.
