A Real Animal

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.

The gorgeous writing in A Real Animal makes its protagonist's risky behaviour all the more harrowing—Lucy’s intelligence does not necessarily protect her. I feared for the young woman with the extravagant sense of what intimacy looks like, creating near-constant suspense in this powerful debut.
- Amy Hempel

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

This is a book that is a calibre above and beyond what we have come to expect from the young-twenties-girl-bildungsroman. There's men, yes, and sex, a lot of it, and yearning to be understood, and for power and a place in the world, but A Real Animal is about the wild, deep, feral core of those themes... 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