Unlikely Animals : A Novel

„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.

Editorial Reviews

02/14/2022

Hartnett (Rabbit Cake) delivers a quirky ghost story set in present-day Upper Valley, N.H., inspired by the legacy of naturalist Ernest Harold Baynes. Emma Starling, 22, drops out of medical school to help care for her father, Clive, who is suffering from a rare brain disease. Clive was forced to retire from his professorship due to his hallucinations of animals and is now obsessed with finding Emma’s high school best friend Crystal Nash, who has been missing for several months. When Emma becomes a substitute teacher for fifth graders, she’s drawn back into all the drama of her hometown, including her brother Auggie’s opioid addiction and her mother Ingrid’s unhappiness. With the police unconcerned over Crystal’s disappearance, Emma decides to work with Clive to solve the mystery. The ghosts of various dead townspeople weigh in throughout, such as „real-life Doctor Doolittle“ Baynes, whom Clive reveres and who now tells Clive what to do. Others lend an amusing point of view to the proceedings („one of the perks of being dead, omniscience within town limits,“ one of them says). While the jarring ending is hard to swallow, Hartnett’s clever prose and brisk pacing will carry readers through. Hartnett’s whimsical storytelling casts a spell. Agent: Katie Grimm, Don Congdon Assoc. (Apr.)
– Publishers Weekly

02/01/2022

In this engaging work of magic realism from Hartnett (Rabbit Cake), readers are introduced to the deceased residents of Everton, NH, before they meet the living. The spirits of Maple Street Cemetery recall the birth of Emma, a child born with the ability to heal. Her parents want her to have a typical childhood, so Emma never develops her gift (other than a teenage turn as a healer for hire), but she heads to medical school, thinking it is her calling–until it isn’t. Emma moves to California to leave behind her brother’s addiction, her father Clive’s infidelity, and prying small-town eyes. Now her father is dying of a strange brain illness that produces animal visions, and she’s returned home. Everton is a mysterious place, with a gated wildlife reserve community most residents have never entered, a possible local drug ring, the unexplained death of a young girl, and Clive’s obsession–the disappearance of Emma’s best friend Crystal. Much unfolds here as Emma settles in and starts a job as a teacher. VERDICT Embracing the undercurrent of fantasy in Everton, readers will contemplate how easy it is to write someone off as unredeemable or unhinged when maybe their brain works in a way most do not understand.–Shaunna E. Hunter
– Library Journal

2022-02-05
An absurdist, laugh-out-loud family drama about intergenerational healing.

Never a truer word was spoken than when the ghostly inhabitants of the Maple Street cemetery in Everton, New Hampshire, who are the choruslike narrators of this novel, rationalize that „a good story doesn’t always follow an arrow.“ In what begins as a slow-paced, meandering tale, Emma Starling, a natural healer and former golden girl of small-town Everton, drops out of medical school and moves back in with her parents. Her father, Clive, who’s dying from a mysterious brain disease, is having hallucinations of animals while being haunted by the ghost of (real-life) local naturalist Ernest Harold Baynes. When Emma assumes legal guardianship over her rapidly deteriorating father, the two become embroiled in his dementia-induced obsession: a seemingly hopeless search for Emma’s childhood best friend, Crystal, a heroin addict who has been missing for almost six months. The first quarter of the book seems like a mess of disparate parts: What does the ghost of New Hampshire’s own Dr. Doolittle have to do with the opioid crisis, boomerang children, saintly healing powers, or a Westworld-esque hunting preserve for millionaires? But the reader’s patience is rewarded as Hartnett skillfully draws the string. This tragicomedy delivers as Clive takes a stab at adult parenting before dying and Emma navigates layers of ambiguous loss. Some plot twists feel a little more forced than others. However, the overall message–that any life lived, even just a few extra months of it, is a miracle rife with potential–is a balm for our challenging times.

An anthem for the boomerang generation.
– Kirkus Reviews

A quirky, poignant novel about family, community and love for our animal friends.“–The Washington Post

„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

„A beguiling, big-hearted story about life and death and what really matters in the end. . . . There is no way you will not love this instant classic.“–Bookreporter

„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

„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

„A wondrous and wonderful story filled with unforgettable characters, both living and dead. An instant classic that will make you question reality even as you embrace a town with a unique relationship to nature and miracles.“ –Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy

„A riotous, joyful, hilarious romp with the wild and the tamed, the living and the dead, Unlikely Animals is both a love letter to John Irving and a literary accomplishment in its own right . . . Unlikely Animals is a triumph.“–Rufi Thorpe, author of The Knockout Queen, finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award

„Unlikely Animals 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, author of Goodbye, Vitamin

„Annie Hartnett’s second novel, Unlikely Animals, is striking and richly imagined, with a voice that is wholly its own. . . . The magic of Hartnett’s novel stems from the balance of these weighty topics with the story’s intrinsic playfulness.“–BookPage (starred review)

„Hartnett masterfully balances a story of deep loss with the perfect amount of hilarity and tenderness.“–Booklist (starred review)

„An absurdist, laugh-out-loud family drama about intergenerational healing.“–Kirkus Reviews
– From the Publisher