An epic, transformative novel following a young woman as she navigates a series of 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, 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.

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‘Perhaps even more impressive than Atwood’s ability to hook readers is how clearly the beginning of A Real Animal outlines the novel’s scope and focus on love and violence, nature and instinct, selfhood and family … A beautiful and unflinching look into pain, healing, human nature, and what it means to be a person … Sharp, memorable, and wrought with a kind of stark honesty that makes for an instantly compelling character … A magnificent debut.’

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‘An astonishing debut with a compelling voice.’

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‘Raw and captivating, this bildungsroman is more rewarding than most others out there.’

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‘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.’

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‘Emeline Atwood’s debut novel stirs with edgy sex, anger, and transcendence.’

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‘This book knocked my socks off with an unreliable (but weirdly relatable) narrator who keeps making bad decisions, but you root for nonetheless.’

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‘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.’

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‘Stunning … A Real Animal depicts violence and trauma in a refreshing, often surprising way — a captivating, remarkable debut.’

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‘As Atwood leaps from one moment in Lucy’s life to another, she captures painfully relatable snippets of experience and frustrating disconnects candidly. Her characters express and encapsulate complex — at times unsavory — emotions in an unapologetic light that manages to hold deep understanding without offering excuses … The connection [Lucy] makes between herself and the animal world serves as a tethering promise that not everything can be neatly explained and accounted for.’

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‘A fearless debut that winningly defies conventional form … An intense and unpredictable novel about the bestial essence that simmers within, A Real Animal showcases the entrails of the human spirit in all their complicated, blistering glory.’

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‘Brave and fantastic … This unforgettable first work is visceral, fearless, relentless, and confrontational. Lucy’s story is heartbreaking and terrible, singular and mundane, and honestly rendered. Atwood’s prose is rich, and the novel is cleverly crafted and interestingly organised, revealing Lucy’s life in compelling ways page by page. A Real Animal is gorgeous, frightening and highly recommended.’

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‘This novel hurts. It hurt me to read it. Terrible things happen to Lucy often out of nowhere, almost breezily. But A Real Animal is also playful and daring and entirely unpredictable while simultaneously being so on point in depicting mundane emotions. In Lucy I recognised the self-conscious fear that the whole room is looking at you or talking about you behind your back, even when really no one is thinking about you that hard. Or the arguments you have over and over in your head so that by the time you speak out loud you’re already exhausted.’

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‘Lucy’s human life is painted in exquisite detail, relatable for all, which grounds the magical realism without missing a beat, making for a cathartic and innovative construction.’

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‘A coming-of-age tale of Homeric Odysseian proportions, A Real Animal is a typhonic stunner of a debut. If Lily King wrote the screenplay for an Ari Aster film, it would look ALMOST something like A Real Animal, but it is also totally original. Not one to miss.’

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‘This is the book you’ll see clutched between the chipped nails of every cool girl this summer.’

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‘Wow, this book is … an absolutely phenomenal read that I thoroughly enjoyed and could not put down — not even for a second. Reading it felt like a fever dream.’