A Real Animal
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date 13 Aug 2026 | Archive Date 28 Oct 2026
Talking about this book? Use #ARealAnimal #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
An epic, transformative novel following a young woman as she navigates a series of three distinct romantic relationships, reckons with the false promise of family intimacy, and seeks connection with the sublime and natural worlds.
Lucy is a senior in college struggling to quell the effects of a sexual assault when she gets a glimpse into a different plane of existence — one that is more wild, physical, animal. Unable to shake the experience, she moves away from home, breaks up with her long-term boyfriend, stops speaking to her mother, and starts dating a dynamic man with a terrifying violent streak.
As she changes cities, friends, and partners, an otherworldly existential force thrums in the back of her mind. It urges her to reject the ordinary, but also reminds her that she is alone in the world. She feels it in the ocean while deep-sea diving, in the cold silences from her mother, in the unknowing gaze of the man she thought would be her soulmate.
We follow Lucy over the course of a decade, witnessing moments of both horrific pain and quotidian happiness. The years pass by seamlessly, bringing her to the edge of her twenties and back to an altered, barren version of her childhood home, where she must finally come to terms with the fear that being human might mean feeling alone, and wild, and unknowable.
Advance Praise
‘Emeline Atwood’s debut novel stirs with edgy sex, anger, and transcendence.’
- Hamilton Cain, Time
‘This book knocked my socks off with an unreliable (but weirdly relatable) narrator who keeps making bad decisions, but you root for nonetheless.’
- Jillian Quint, PureWow
‘A powerhouse. Atwood’s book is simply one of the best books I’ve read since I started covering books. She perfectly writes the turbulent time when one finishes college and enters “adulthood” — whatever that means.’
- Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful
‘This is a book that is a calibre above and beyond what we have come to expect from the young-twenties-girl-bildungsroman … The book has this feeling about it, like there’s so much within the pages that’s just bursting to get out: a violent and powerful urge for something, for more survival, for more agency, to express one’s pain, to feel better. A Real Animal is as raw and visceral as an open-mouthed scream: you hear it in your bones. You can see its teeth.’
- Julia Hass, Literary Hub
'In a moment when we often find ourselves numb and distracted, Emeline Atwood has given us an enlivening and powerful novel about what it means to dwell and be changed. It gets under your skin. Atwood is an ambitious writer, as at home in the colloquial as she is in the lyrical. A tremendous accomplishment.’
- Stephanie Wambugu, author of Lonely Crowds
Available Editions
| ISBN | 9781917189323 |
| PRICE | $18.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 368 |