Bad Animals
By Sarah Braunstein
W. W. Norton & Company, March 19, 2024
A sexy, propulsive novel that confronts the limits of empathy and the perils of appropriation through the eyes of a disgraced small-town librarian.
Now that her brilliant daughter is off at college, buttoned-up Maeve Cosgrove loves her job at her quiet Maine public library more than anything. But when a teenager accuses Maeve—Maeve!—of spying on her romantic escapades in the mezzanine bathroom, she winds up laid off and humiliated. While Maeve attempts to clear her name, her favorite author, Harrison Riddles, finally responds to her invitation to speak at the library. Riddles announces a plan to write a novel about another young library patron, a Sudanese refugee, and enlists Maeve’s help in convincing him to participate. A scheme to get her job back draws Maeve further into Riddles’s universe—where shocking questions about sex, morality, and the purpose of literature threaten to upend her orderly life.
A writer of “savage compassion” (Salvatore Scibona, author of The Volunteer), Sarah Braunstein constructs a shrewd, page-turning caper that explores one woman’s search for agency and ultimate reckoning with the kind of animal she is.
Selected Praise
“A dazzling high-wire act. Absolutely chilling.”—Richard Russo, author of Somebody’s Fool
“Bad Animals opens with a delightful shock, and then the fun begins. With deft, sly, loving insight into the human animal and its genius for self-deception, Braunstein ratchets up and sustains this extraordinary novel’s elegance and complexity until the last, beautiful sentence.”—Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man and Welcome Home, Stranger
“Wild, wicked, whip-smart, hilarious–Bad Animals brought out the hungry reader in me and I devoured it, blissfully. Sarah Braunstein is unsparing on the subjects of whiteness, literary lions, and good intentions, yet so large-hearted that this giddy misadventure cannot help but turn moving in the most true and abiding way.”—Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, author of Likes
About the Author
Sarah Braunstein is the author of The Sweet Relief of Missing Children. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and the Harvard Review. The recipient of a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” award, she lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches at Colby College.