A Real Animal

In this unforgettable debut, a moment of metaphysical transformation launches a woman's beautiful and terrifying journey through her twenties, through loneliness and complicated love that takes her from the depths of the Pacific Ocean to the plains of Texas

A Real Animal follows Lucy through the decade dividing college and real adulthood, as she navigates three distinct romantic relationships, reckons with the false promise of family intimacy, and seeks connection with the sublime and natural worlds. Lucy wants her life to be extraordinary. But this desire never seems to graft easily onto the smallness of her world. As a senior in college struggling to quell the destructive effects of a sexual assault, she gets a glimpse of a different plane of existence--more wild, physical, animal. She moves away from home, breaks up with her long term boyfriend, stops speaking to her mother, and starts dating a complicated, violent man.

As she changes cities, friends, and partners, there is a persistent sense of wildness in Lucy and in her world that's only ever barely being controlled. The thrum of a nonhuman existential force in the back of her mind urges her to reject the ordinary, but also reminds her that she is alone in the world. She feels it in the depths of the ocean while deep sea diving, in the cold silences on phone calls with her sister and her mom, in the misunderstanding gaze of a man she thought would love her forever.

Guided by Emeline Atwood's lightspeed, suspenseful prose, we follow Lucy across states, jobs, relationships, and stages of intimacy with her family, witnessing both moments of horrific pain and quotidian happiness. The years pass by seamlessly, 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 itself might mean feeling alone, and wild, and unknowable.

Author: Emeline Atwood
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 07/07/2026
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.18lbs
Size: 8.47h x 5.88w x 1.19d
ISBN: 9781646222964


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 04/01/2026 pg. 61
Publishers Weekly 05/25/2026
Booklist 07/01/2026
Shelf Awareness 01/01/0001

About the Author
EMELINE ATWOOD graduated from the Michener Center for Writers in 2023. She writes fiction and poetry and is a recipient of the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize, the Begley Fiction Prize, the Hatch Poetry Prize, and the Le Baron Russell Briggs Fiction Prize. She lives in Austin.