The long-awaited new book from the critically acclaimed author of The Lightkeepers and The Wildlands: an intense and insightful collection that celebrates the horrors and joys of inhabiting our bodiesThe body cannot tell any lies. From birth to death, and through all the transitions in between, the body stores our knowledge and history, our feelings and experiences. Our betrayals. These insightful and empathetic stories, from the critically acclaimed author of The Last Animal, shine new light on our physical vessels set against our physical world, two landscapes irretrievably connected and altered over time.An entomologist solves cold cases and upholds a sense of justice by studying the decay of corpses in a field and the insect life they develop. A caregiver obsesses over a stained-glass lampshade to deal with the elegiac losses of Alzheimer’s. A sister with webbed fingers highlights the often-universal belief that our siblings just...

From the author of The Lightkeepers, Winner of the 2016 B&N Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction, comes a story that explores the bonds of siblings and the animal instincts that threaten to tear them apart Mercy, Oklahoma became infamous when a Category Five tornado ravaged the small town. No family was more devastated than the McClouds: four siblings left orphaned, their home and farm gone. Darlene, Jane, and Cora became the media focus of the tornado's aftermath, causing great tension with Tucker, who soon abandoned his sisters to their grief and disappeared. On the three-year anniversary of the tornado, a cosmetics factory outside of Mercy is bombed, and the lab animals trapped within are released. This violent act appears at first to have nothing to do with "the saddest family in Mercy." Then Tucker reappears, injured in the blast, and seeks the help of nine-year-old Cora. Caught up in the thrall of her brilliant, charismatic brother, whom she...

The Last Animal by Abby Geni is that rare literary find — a remarkable series of stories unified around one theme: people who use the interface between the human and the natural world to contend with their modern challenges in love, loss, and family life. These are vibrant, weighty stories that herald the arrival of a young writer of surprising feeling and depth.“Terror Birds” tracks the dissolution of a marriage set against an ostrich farm in the sweltering Arizona desert; “Dharma at the Gate” features the tempest of young love as a teenaged girl must choose between man’s best friend, her damaged boyfriend, and a beckoning future; “Captivity” follows an octopus handler at an aquarium still haunted by the disappearance of her brother years ago; “The Girls of Apache Bryn Mawr” details a Greek chorus of Jewish girls at a summer camp whose favorite counselor goes missing under suspicious circumstances; “In the...

In The Lightkeepers, we follow Miranda, a nature photographer who travels to the Farallon Islands, an exotic and dangerous archipelago off the coast of California, for a one-year residency capturing the landscape. Her only companions are the scientists studying there, odd and quirky refugees from the mainland living in rustic conditions; they document the fish populations around the island, the bold trio of sharks called the Sisters that hunt the surrounding waters, and the overwhelming bird population who, at times, create the need to wear hard hats as protection from their attacks.Shortly after her arrival, Miranda is assaulted by one of the inhabitants of the islands. A few days later, her assailant is found dead, perhaps the result of an accident. As the novel unfolds, Miranda gives witness to the natural wonders of this special place as she grapples with what has happened to her and deepens her connection (and her suspicions) to her companions, while falling...