Only the Animals

From award-winning novelist Ceridwen Dovey, a collection of short stories as innovative and beautifully written as Nam Le's The Boat. These ten tales are told by the souls of animals killed in human conflicts in the past century or so, including a camel in colonial Australia, a cat in the trenches in World War I, a bear who starved during the siege of Sarajevo. Each narrator pays homage to writers who've written imaginatively about animals during a similar time span: Henry Lawson, Colette, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy, Günter Grass, Jack Kerouac, Julian Barnes, and multiple others. These stories are brilliantly plotted, exquisitely written, inevitably poignant but also playful and witty. They ask profound questions. Why do animals shock us into feeling things we can't seem to feel for other humans? Why do animals allow authors to say the unsayable? Why do we sometimes treat humans as animals, and animals as humans? Can fiction help us find moral meaning in a disillusioned world? Ceridwen Dovey is a prodigiously gifted storyteller, an insightful thinker, and a prose writer of great range. Each of the voices of these ten narrators is unique and unmistakable, each of the storylines an opening to a new way of considering the nature of violence, and the connections between the human and animal worlds. 'Only the Animals is mesmerizing and exhilarating, funny and moving. It has elements of strangeness and greatness, like Kafka. Dovey's exquisitely drawn creatures grapple nobly with their animal natures, a genius point of view from which to illuminate how we humans - ostensibly conscious and verbal - are trapped in ours. This book feels like a major mind announcing itself.' Anna Funder 'Dovey has surely created with Only the Animals one of the boldest Australian short story collections in recent years. A book that may wear its literary antecedents (Kafka, Collette, Woolf, Coetzee) lightly, but actually belongs in that sort of company.' Martin Shaw 'Dovey's second (book) after the acclaimed 2007 novel Blood Kin, confirms her as a singular talent.' Stephen Romei, The Weekend Australian 'An audacious work of the imagination . . . An extraordinary series of fabulist tales . . . The yarns are funny, tragic, smart, arch, poignant and playful all at once.' The Saturday Age 'The emotional heat here is pitched at Bunsen burner blue — hard and clear, without a flicker of showy sentiment — while the main criticism that might be launched against such stories, that they traffic in a naive anthropomorphism, is checked at every move by a rigorous deployment of contemporary developments in animal psychology and neuroscience.The best of the stories are not only smart in a modern, scientific sense, however; they keep one foot in the older, folkloric tradition of animal stories, and in a wonder that is as old as our species . . . What Dovey ventures is to rescue animals from the cultural margins. To be seen by animals is a profound inversion of the situation where it is we who do the watching. The results are sometimes profound, and always powerfully disconcerting.' Weekend Australian 'I was unprepared for the anarchic brilliance of this wonderful book. Dovey persuades us of her characters as she teeters on the edge of sentimentality, but in the next breath she dances back and Only the Animals becomes a kind of conversation that anticipates the reader's - at least, this reader's – response and parries it . . . it is an examination: there is palpable restraint on the page and Dovey draws no conclusions. Only the Animals is a glorious imaginative leap, not into the minds of animals, but into our own. The idea that fiction can be both playful and intelligent should not be so surprising . . . It's layered and astonishing and far and away the best thing I've read this year. Dovey has a particular talent for mixing exuberance and melancholy in the one story without tonal jerks or jars, and this story sparkles on the page . . . It's beautiful writing, but besides that, it's enthralling. Most writers don't generate this much genuine emotion over the course of an entire career… It's clever work, but it's never tricky for the sake of it. This kind of writing is the fictional equivalent of walking a high wire without a net . . . As a collection, Only the Animals works as a journey into empathy that, for all its ideas, never neglects the basics of fiction: showing readers in beautiful words compelling characters who do fascinating things . . . To get away with that kind of self-referential nudging, the work has to be very good and the writer, very brave. Only the Animals makes much contemporary fiction seem stodgy and grey, and Dovey has put everything on the line here. It's a remarkable achievement.' The Saturday Paper 'Only the Animals doesn't behave like a novel. It slips between categories . . . [and] both defies and celebrates the possibilities of the form . . . it is an ambitious book with a fable-like surface, and a whole churning world beneath . . . [confirming] Dovey's talent . . . [the book is] heartbreaking and riveting . . . painfully beautiful . . . That the prose still sparkles, and that the stories pull at the heart, despite the somewhat awkward, weighty premise, is a remarkable achievement . . . Dovey voices the uncomfortable, she speaks the unspeakable, through the shifting mouthpiece of these animals.' Romy Ash, for The Guardian 'A suite of associatively linked stories that dares this imaginative leap. It is a haunted book . . . [with] a subtler play of awareness and self-awareness . . . [and] a bravura flair for pastiche . . . Only the Animals is a form of lyrical anthropology, a partial but generous approach to the changing significances of animals in our literary Imaginations . . . This is a book of consistently good stories deftly told, full of drama and emotion . . . [with] an attractive unity of purpose that suggests more than the sum of its parts, a greater consciousness, perhaps, hovering somewhere between heartbreak and hopefulness, wisdom and wonderment.' Canberra Times 'Dovey is a natural storyteller . . . The author's portrayals of human–animal interactions evoke images of lasting beauty and power . . . Whether you agree with Dovey's approach to humans and animals or not, no one interested in either will be sorryto have read this book.' Sam Cadman, Australian Book Review 'A strange and beautiful work . . . Each story is self-contained, but each is far richer – in terms of emotional and philosophical resonance – for its proximity to the others. To put it another way: Only the Animals is a perfectly integrated work of art brilliantly disguised as a collection of short stories.' Richard King, The Monthly 'Dovey has created a masterpiece, a tapestry of voices so strong that it's impossible not to mourn when each story comes to an end . . . At no point do these creature-characters ring false . . . Dovey is a writer of vast imagination and intelligence . . . [managing] to shed new light on these voices and their ideas . . . Halfway through the Kerouac-ian story of a mussel hitching rides around the coast of America you realise that you are in the hands of a genius. Sure, you'll laugh, but the astonishing thing is that you will empathise, too.' Adelaide Advertiser 'We challenge you not to get caught up.' Elle 'wholly extraordinary.' Michelle de Krester