Only the Animals

From award-winning novelist Ceridwen Dovey, a collection of short stories as innovative and beautifully written as Nam Le's The Boat.
These ten tales are told by the souls of animals killed in human conflicts in the past century or so, including a camel in colonial Australia, a cat in the trenches in World War I, a bear who starved during the siege of Sarajevo. Each narrator pays homage to writers who've written imaginatively about animals during a similar time span: Henry Lawson, Colette, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy, Günter Grass, Jack Kerouac, Julian Barnes, and multiple others.
These stories are brilliantly plotted, exquisitely written, inevitably poignant but also playful and witty. They ask profound questions. Why do animals shock us into feeling things we can't seem to feel for other humans? Why do animals allow authors to say the unsayable? Why do we sometimes treat humans as animals, and animals as humans? Can fiction help us find moral meaning in a disillusioned world?
Ceridwen Dovey is a prodigiously gifted storyteller, an insightful thinker, and a prose writer of great range. Each of the voices of these ten narrators is unique and unmistakable, each of the storylines an opening to a new way of considering the nature of violence, and the connections between the human and animal worlds.