New Animal

Ella Baxter

$29.99

Paperback

In stock
Ready to ship

QTY:

English

Allen & Unwin
02 March 2021

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945); Australian Fiction

'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.

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's 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

By: Ella Baxter
Imprint: Allen & Unwin
Country of Publication: Australia
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm,
Weight: 308g
ISBN: 9781760877798
ISBN 10: 1760877794
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 02 March 2021
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Ella Baxter is a writer and artist living on unceded land of the Wurundjeri people. She has had poetry published in Spineless Wonders, Gargouille Literary Journal, and Bowen St Press. Her sculptures have been exhibited in site specific locations around Victoria, as well as at Gasworks Arts Park, and featured in Beyond Words Literary Magazine. In her spare time she runs a small business making bespoke death shrouds. Her debut novel, New Animal, will be released through Allen and Unwin in 2021. She is currently writing her second novel, Woo Woo.