Animals: A Novel - Softcover

Lepan, Don

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1593762771 ISBN 13: 9781593762773

Publisher: Soft Skull, 2010

Synopsis

It is more than 100 years in the future and the horrors of factory farming, combined with the widespread abuse of antibiotics, have led to mass extinctions. The majority of all mammals, birds, and fish that humans have eaten for millennia no longer exist. Add to that an ever-widening gap between rich and poor and an overtaxed healthcare system. Those not fully capable the handicapped, those with birth defects and congenital illness are deemed undeserving of an equal share of scarce medical resources and are ultimately classified as less than human. As paranoia about our food supplies spreads, a forceful new logic takes hold; in the blink of a millennial eye the disenfranchised have become our food.
Don LePan’s powerful and compelling novel shows us a world at once eerily foreign and disturbingly familiar. It follows the Stinsons Carrie, Zayne, and their daughter Naomi and the dramatic events that unfold within their family after they take in an abandoned mongrel boy. In the sharp-edged poignancy of the ethical questions it poses, in the striking narrative techniques it employs, and above all, in the remarkable power of the story it tells, Animals proves itself a transformative work of fiction.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Tammy kept losing jobs―at the checkout counter, as a hospital cleaner, and now with the before-and-after-school program. But what worried her most was Sam, her youngest. From the time he was very young it had been clear that something was wrong with Sam, seriously wrong. And though they didn’t often speak of it, the whole family could certainly see it. “He’s pathetic,” Sam’s sister Letitia would sneer to her friends, “pathetic.” Tammy never felt that way herself, not for a moment. But what was she to do?―that was the question. Animals follows Sam on the extraordinary odyssey that begins with Tammy’s decision. Central to the narrative of his progress are the Stinson family―above all Naomi Stinson, a young girl who develops a special feeling for the strange creature, Sam.

Animals is set in an indeterminate future in which virtually all the species that humans have for millennia used as food have become extinct; the world it creates is at once eerily foreign and disturbingly familiar. In the sharp-edged poignancy of the ethical questions it poses, in the strikingly innovative narrative techniques it employs, and above all, in the remarkable power of the story it tells, Animals is, quite simply, unique.

About the Author

Don LePan is the founder and president of the academic publishing house Broadview Press. His books include a study of Shakespeare s plots and of cognitive history, an overview of common errors in English, and a monograph on Tennyson s war poetry. This is his first book of fiction. He lives in Nanaimo, British Columbia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Soft Skull
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1593762771
• ISBN 13: 9781593762773
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176