Animal

Critics Review

• Few writers can match Taddeo’s swagger on sentence-level. She has a knack for the unexpected, shocking phrase that feels nonchalantly tossed, like dynamite to a fire

  The Globe and Mail

• A compulsive read. Taddeo’s prose glitters with all the dark wit and flashes of insight that readers and critics admired in Three Women . . . Like Coel’s I May Destroy You, Animal is unafraid to wrestle with big questions about sexual empowerment and consent, and doesn’t pretend to have found neat answers

  Guardian

• American Psycho for the #MeToo generation

  The Times

• Propulsive, fiercely confident . . . Joan’s voice is so sharp and magnetic that the reader will follow her anywhere

  New York Times

• Joan’s fury feels fitting, in a new age of righteous rage and brave honesty in female-driven and female-penned art, from Promising Young Women and I May Destroy You, to Raven Leilani’s Luster

  Harper's Bazaar

• An explosive, visceral story about childhood trauma, sexual violence, sisterhood and grief. In vivid, unforgiving prose, Taddeo charts the fate of its unforgettable antiheroine, Joan

  i

• A raging, funny and fierce thriller with a protagonist whose life force, against extraordinary odds — always in the gaze and sometimes the grasp of predatory, abusive men — is a thing of wonder

  Financial Times

• This summer’s most-hyped book and more than lives up to the buzz . . . A dark, disturbing masterpiece, full of righteous female rage – every word roars right off the page

  Red

• A fever dream of a read . . . Intense, disturbing and provoking, it’s also a book that’s filled with humanity, sensuality and, in the end, love and hope . . . Read, give to your friends and discuss at length

  Stylist

• Wow. Dark, hypnotic and horrifying, with a central protagonist in Joan who demands your deepest empathy despite every transgression, it’s brilliantly written and expertly done. I loved it

  Harriet Tyce, bestselling author of Blood Orange and The Lies You Told

• An outstanding novel, unnerving but brilliant

  Samira Ahmed, BBC Radio 4 Front Row

• I don’t think there is a writer alive who writes about the interior lives of women with the raw truth and intensity [Taddeo] does . . . Fearless, sexy, brutal and just forensically observed. She is extraordinary

  Jojo Moyes

• Raging, hilarious and utterly addictive

  Daily Mail

• Scorching, unforgettable, stunningly beautiful, Animal blew my mind and has left me reeling

  Clover Stroud

• [An] audacious debut novel

  Evening Standard

• Reeling. Stunned. It is ablaze with rage and beauty. You’ve captured all the rage every woman has been suppressing her entire life. Mary Gaitskill eat your heart out

  Sam Baker

• Riveting . . . Propulsive, erotic, emotional . . . Joan is almost impossible to look away from on every page

  Kirkus Reviews

• The best way I can think to describe Lisa Taddeo’s first novel is “like if Joan Didion got into hard drugs and carried a switchblade everywhere.” Sun-parched, sinewy, and hostile (in a good way)

  Harper's Bazaar

• A riveting, visceral examination of trauma and rage told by a writer whose prose lights a match and burns up the page. Joan is an unforgettable antiheroine. I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking about her.

  Elizabeth Day