‘This tragicomic novel is heartfelt, touching, and delightfully quirky. You’ll fall in love with the offbeat cast of characters (both living and dead) and find yourself rooting for them right through the last page.’—Good Housekeeping (Book Club pick)
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.
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Book Riot • Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
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.
Genre: Literary Fiction
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.
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Book Riot • Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
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.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"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. This book is a winner." - Kristen Arnett
"No one is better at heart than Annie Hartnett--in the best, most layered, most complicated, and deeply human sense--and still Unlikely Animals stunned me. In a book rich with miracles, it's this complexity and expansiveness of connection that feels most miraculous of all." - Clare Beams
"Unlikely Animals is a modern fairy tale that beguiles and breaks the heart. Annie Hartnett walks a tightrope of comedy and tragedy in tender, sparkling prose cut with wit. This is a large-hearted story populated by an original and amiable cast of characters--human, animal, spirit--about living, dying, and all the messiness in between." - Rachel Khong
"Unlikely Animals is a wonderful love song to a place and the people who live there, past and present. It is a warm, joyful, generous novel about families and human frailty--an homage to the dead and a celebration of the living." - Lydia Kiesling
"A riotous, joyful, hilarious romp with the wild and the tamed, the living and the dead, Unlikely Animals is a triumph." - Rufi Thorpe
"Unlikely Animals is a testament to the wild talent of Annie Hartnett. This novel 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
"No one is better at heart than Annie Hartnett--in the best, most layered, most complicated, and deeply human sense--and still Unlikely Animals stunned me. In a book rich with miracles, it's this complexity and expansiveness of connection that feels most miraculous of all." - Clare Beams
"Unlikely Animals is a modern fairy tale that beguiles and breaks the heart. Annie Hartnett walks a tightrope of comedy and tragedy in tender, sparkling prose cut with wit. This is a large-hearted story populated by an original and amiable cast of characters--human, animal, spirit--about living, dying, and all the messiness in between." - Rachel Khong
"Unlikely Animals is a wonderful love song to a place and the people who live there, past and present. It is a warm, joyful, generous novel about families and human frailty--an homage to the dead and a celebration of the living." - Lydia Kiesling
"A riotous, joyful, hilarious romp with the wild and the tamed, the living and the dead, Unlikely Animals is a triumph." - Rufi Thorpe
"Unlikely Animals is a testament to the wild talent of Annie Hartnett. This novel 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
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