New Animal
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
A stunning, heartbreakingly funny debut novel from a brilliant new literary voice. Sex, death, grief, running away...only one of these makes Amelia feel like a new animal.
'Profound, profane and darkly hilarious.' - Bri Lee
'Funny, raw, gutsy and stealthily sweet.' - Emily Maguire
... most nights I find myself trying to combine with someone else to become this two-headed thing with flailing limbs, chomping teeth, and tangled hair. This new animal. I am medicated by another body. Drunk on warm skin. Dumbly high on the damp friction between them and me.
It's not easy getting close to people. Amelia's meeting a lot of men but once she gets the sex she wants from them, that's it for her; she can't connect further. A terrible thing happened to Daniel last year and it's stuck inside Amelia ever since, making her stuck too.
Maybe being a cosmetician at her family's mortuary business isn't the best job for a young woman. It's not helping her social life. She loves her job, but she's not great at much else. Especially emotion.
And then something happens to her mum and suddenly Amelia's got too many feelings and the only thing that makes any sense to her is running away.
It takes the intervention of her two fathers and some hilariously wrong encounters with other broken people in a struggling Tasmanian BDSM club to help her accept the truth she has been hiding from. And in a final, cataclysmic scene, we learn along with Amelia that you need to feel another person's weight before you can feel your own.
Deadpan, wise and heartbreakingly funny, New Animal is a stunning debut.
'New Animal is a wild, moving and original debut - and like the best bits of sex and funerals, it's very, very funny.' - Robert Lukins
'Sex, death, humour, and heart - this novel has it all.' - Laura Elizabeth Woollett
'...deeply uncomfortable, laugh-out-loud funny and devastatingly moving...' - Erin Hortle
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.
