This Animal Body: A Novel

Frankie Conner, first-year graduate student at UC Berkeley, is finally getting her life together. After multiple failures and several false starts, she’s found her calling: become a neuroscientist, discover the cause of her depression and anxiety, and hopefully find a cure for herself and everyone like her. But her first day of the program, Frankie meets a mysterious group of talking animals who claim to have an urgent message for her. The problem is, they’re not willing to share it. Not yet. Not until she’s ready. While Frankie’s new friends may not have her highly evolved, state-of-the-art, exalted human brain, they do know things she doesn’t—poems, scientific facts, and what happened in the forgotten years before her adoption. Frankie can’t dismiss her conversations with these animals as mere dreams, but she also can’t accept them as real. To prove she’s still sane, she investigates her past and defies the professor who heads her lab to conduct a series of scientific experiments to test just how much animals are capable of communicating. Just when Frankie uncovers the truth, she has to make an impossible choice: betray the animals she’s fallen in love with—or give up her dream of neuroscience, her last chance at success, and everything she thought she knew. This Animal Body is printed on FSC-certified paper from responsibly-managed, environmentally-sound sources.