In the hands of another writer, this would all be hopelessly twee. Navy to fight enemy divers in Iraq, writes posthumous letters to Sylvia Plath. In another, a Russian tortoise escapes from its hermit owner, is adopted by Leo Tolstoy’s daughter, becomes the pet of Virginia Woolf in London (in a section called “A Terrarium of One’s Own”), and ultimately returns to the motherland, where she's launched into orbit as part of the Soviet Space Program. In one, a Kerouac-ian mussel seeks adventure and meaning on the hull of a ship. Not every story is so grim, however, and while all of them are dark, some are tragically hilarious, brilliant in their absurdity.

In war-ravaged Mozambique, twin elephants come of age listening to tales of their ancestors. “Hundstage,” one of the eerier tales in the bunch, follows Himmler’s dog, exiled in the Polish forest. In “Pigeons, a Pony, the Tomcat, and I,” a house cat-inadvertently separated from her beloved bohemian owner-prowls the trenches of the western front, giving comfort to the soldiers and recounting adventures from better days. Wonderfully weird and profoundly witty, Australian writer Dovey recounts a history of 20th-century human catastrophe in 10 short stories, each told by an animal who was there. An animal's-eye-view of humans at our brutal, violent worst and our creative, imaginative best, it asks us to find our way back to empathy not only for animals but for other people, and to believe again in the redemptive power of reading and writing fiction. Navy writes a letter to Sylvia Plath.Įxquisitely written, playful, and poignant, Ceridwen Dovey's Only the Animals is a remarkable literary achievement by one of our brightest young writers. During the Siege of Sarajevo, a starving bear tells a fairy tale. A Russian tortoise once owned by the Tolstoys drifts in space during the Cold War. In Nazi Germany, a dog seeks enlightenment. In a trench on the Western Front, a cat recalls her owner Colette's theatrical antics in Paris. The souls of ten animals caught up in human conflicts over the last century and connected to both famous and little-known writers in surprising ways tell their astonishing stories of life and death. Perhaps only the animals can tell us what it is to be human Ceridwen Dovey, Only the Animals, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Only the animals by ceridwen dovey