Unlikely Animals

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What to expect

A lost young woman returns to small-town New Hampshire under the strangest of circumstances in this one-of-a-kind novel of life, death, and whatever comes after from the acclaimed author of Rabbit Cake.

It was a source of entertainment at Maple Street Cemetery. Both funny and sad, the kind of story we like best.

Natural-born healer Emma Starling once had big plans for her life, but she's lost her way. A medical school dropout, she's come back to small-town Everton, New Hampshire, to care for her father, who is dying from a mysterious brain disease. Clive Starling has been hallucinating small animals, as well as having visions of the ghost of a long-dead naturalist, Ernest Harold Baynes, once known for letting wild animals live in his house. This ghost has been giving Clive some ideas on how to spend his final days.

Emma arrives home knowing she must face her dad's illness, her mom's judgment, and her younger brother's recent stint in rehab, but she's unprepared to find that her former best friend from high school is missing, with no one bothering to look for her. The police say they don't spend much time looking for drug addicts. Emma's dad is the only one convinced the young woman might still be alive, and Emma is hopeful he could be right. Someone should look for her, at least. Emma isn't really trying to be a hero, but somehow she and her father bring about just the kind of miracle the town needs.

Set against the backdrop of a small town in the throes of a very real opioid crisis, Unlikely Animals is a tragicomic novel about familial expectations, imperfect friendships, and the possibility of resurrecting that which had been thought irrevocably lost.

'Bewitching!' New York Times

'A wondrous and wonderful story filled with unforgettable characters, both living and dead . . . an instant classic' Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy

'Hartnett's whimsical storytelling casts a spell' Publishers Weekly

'An absurdist, laugh-out-loud family drama about intergenerational healing' Kirkus Reviews

(P) 2022 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

A wondrous and wonderful story filled with unforgettable characters, both living and dead . . . an instant classic
Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy
Hartnett's whimsical storytelling casts a spell
Publishers Weekly
An absurdist, laugh-out-loud family drama about intergenerational healing
Kirkus Reviews
I devoured Annie Hartnett's Unlikely Animals. She's created a beautiful menagerie set inside a troubled household and their small New Hampshire town; a delightful mess of tenderness, grief, and despair, but most important, hope
Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things and With Teeth
Unlikely Animals possesses such tenderness and empathy for a world that wears us down and ruins us, a world that sometimes offers a glimmer of hope, and Hartnett knows how to turn up the brilliance of that light and wield it to do magical things
Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here and The Family Fang
Hartnett masterfully balances a story of deep loss with the perfect amount of hilarity and tenderness
Booklist (starred review)
This is a big novel doing big things. It bears some similarity to Hartnett's much- loved first novel, Rabbit Cake. . . . But Unlikely Animals is a broader, brassier, and even more fiercely tender story. In this, her second novel, Hartnett lands an astonishing leap as a storyteller
The Rumpus
Wistfully charming . . . This unapologetically genre-bending tribute to life and death, and the beautiful weirdness found in both, has potential to spark exceptional book club discussions
Shelf Awareness
Bewitching!
New York Times
[A] a magical, soul-stirring read about family and the ways we put ourselves back together
The Washington Post
Heartfelt, touching and delightfully quirky
Good Housekeeping
A moving novel about family, friendship and loss that manages to be both at times quirkily surreal as well as rooted in the realities of small-town life
Choice

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