Only the Animals is a high-concept collection that only a very small number of authors could possibly pull off. The other nine stories in Dovey's book, all featuring animal narrators, range from mediocre to awful. The bird, adopted by an American divorcée who has moved to Beirut, makes for an intriguing narrator, and the story is clever, biting and wistfully sad. That's obviously not an easy thing to pull off, but Dovey manages it beautifully. Here's the good news about Ceridwen Dovey's short story collection Only the Animals: It contains a genuinely moving story told from the point of view of a parrot. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Only The Animals will ask you to believe again, just for a moment, in the redemptive power of reading and writing fiction.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Only the Animals Subtitle Stories Author Ceridwen Dovey Each of the storylines is an opening to a new way of considering the nature of violence and the relationship between human and animal experiences of the world. 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?Ĭeridwen Dovey is a prodigiously gifted storyteller, an insightful thinker, and a prose writer of great range. They ask us to consider profound questions. These stories are brilliantly plotted, exquisitely written, inevitably poignant but also playful and witty. Each narrator also pays homage to an author who has written imaginatively about animals during much the same time span: Henry Lawson, Colette, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy, Günter Grass, Julian Barnes, and others. Ten tales are told by the souls of animals killed in human conflicts in the past century or so, from a camel in colonial Australia to a cat in the trenches in World War I, from a bear starved to death during the siege of Sarajevo to a mussel that died in Pearl Harbour. From award-winning novelist Ceridwen Dovey, a collection of linked short stories as innovative and beautifully written as Nam Le's The Boat.

Only the animals by ceridwen dovey