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  • Published: 23 April 2024
  • ISBN: 9780593420539
  • Imprint: Riverhead
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $40.00

The Last Animal

A Novel




A playful, witty, and resonant novel in which a single mother and her two teen daughters engage in a wild scientific experiment and discover themselves in the process, from the award-winning writer of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“Whip-smart and compulsively readable. . . both a wildly entertaining adventure story and a meditation on what it means to love your children—fiercely and imperfectly.”—Oprah Daily

“Springs alive to explore questions that stump scientists and families, problems of the head and the heart.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“A full-hearted portrait of sisterhood, family and the ways we process grief. Charming, wry, and original.” —People

TWO SISTERS, ONE MOM, AND ONE WOOLLY SECRET.

Teenage sisters Eve and Vera never imagined their summer vacation would be spent in the Arctic, tagging along on their mother’s scientific expedition. But there’s a lot about their lives lately that hasn’t been going as planned, and truth be told, their single mother might not be so happy either.

Now in Siberia with a bunch of serious biologists, Eve and Vera are just bored enough to cause trouble. Fooling around in the permafrost, they accidentally discover a perfectly preserved, four-thousand-year-old baby mammoth, and things finally start to get interesting. The discovery sets off a surprising chain of events, leading mother and daughters to go rogue, pinging from the slopes of Siberia to the shores of Iceland to an exotic animal farm in Italy, and resulting in the birth of a creature that could change the world—or at least this family.

The Last Animal takes readers on a wild, entertaining, and refreshingly different kind of journey, one that explores the possibilities and perils of the human imagination on a changing planet, what it’s like to be a woman in a field dominated by men, and how a wondrous discovery can best be enjoyed with family. Even teenagers.

  • Published: 23 April 2024
  • ISBN: 9780593420539
  • Imprint: Riverhead
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $40.00

About the author

Ramona Ausubel

Ramona Ausubel is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. She has been published in The New Yorker, One Story, The Paris Review Daily and Best American Fantasy. Ausubel is the recipient of the Glenn Schaeffer Award for fiction, and was a finalist for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in California.

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Praise for The Last Animal


Praise for The Last Animal:
"Ausubel’s fourth volume of highly original fabulist fiction. . .marries an extraordinary and slightly bananas scientific adventure with a deeply felt portrait of a mother and daughters healing from terrible loss. . . .An amazing amount of humor, pizazz, wisdom, and wonder packed into a story that is essentially about processing grief."–Kirkus, STARRED review

“The Ice Age meets the Anthropocene in this gem from Ausubel… Ausubel is at her best when exploring the ties that bind, especially in a family flung into unprecedented circumstances. In charting the parallel worlds of grief, scientific devotion, and adolescence, Ausubel comes up with a seamless global caper that brims with compassion and makes the reader glad to be alive.”–Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

“[A] transfixing, fabulist tale centering the life-giving power of women within a scientific frame… a feminist Jurassic Park. The narration...is lush and full of wonder as a family is broken and reshaped, and the women come of age, evolve, and grapple with the limits and conflicts of biology and ambition.”–Booklist