In this unforgettable debut, a moment of metaphysical transformation launches a woman’s beautiful and terrifying journey through her 20s, through loneliness and complicated love that takes her from the depths of the Pacific Ocean to the plains of Texas.

A REAL ANIMAL follows Lucy through the decade dividing college and real adulthood, as she navigates three distinct romantic relationships, reckons with the false promise of family intimacy, and seeks connection with the sublime and natural worlds. As a senior in college struggling to quell the destructive effects of a sexual assault, she gets a glimpse of a different plane of existence --- more wild, physical, animal. She moves away from home, breaks up with her long-term boyfriend, stops speaking to her mother, and starts dating a complicated, violent man.

As she changes cities, friends and partners, there is a persistent sense of wildness in Lucy and in her world that’s only ever barely being controlled. The thrum of a nonhuman existential force in the back of her mind urges her to reject the ordinary, but also reminds her that she is alone in the world. She feels it in the depths of the ocean while deep sea diving, in the cold silences on phone calls with her sister and her mom, in the misunderstanding gaze of a man she thought would love her forever.

Guided by Emeline Atwood’s lightspeed, suspenseful prose, we follow Lucy across states, jobs, relationships and stages of intimacy with her family, witnessing both moments of horrific pain and quotidian happiness. The years pass by seamlessly, bringing her to the edge of her 20s and back to an altered, barren version of her childhood home, where she finally must come to terms with the fear that being human itself might mean feeling alone, wild and unknowable.