> Skip to content
Play sample
  • Published: 18 April 2023
  • ISBN: 9780593420546
  • Imprint: PEN US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

The Last Animal

A Novel





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: 18 April 2023
  • ISBN: 9780593420546
  • Imprint: PEN US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

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.

Also by Ramona Ausubel

See all