New Animal

(Paperback)

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'Profound, profane and darkly hilarious.' - Bri Lee

'Funny, raw, gutsy and stealthily sweet.' - Emily Maguire

Amelia is no stranger to sex and death.

Her job in her family's funeral parlour, doing make-up on the dead, might be unusual, but she's good at it. Life and warmth comes from the men she meets online - combining with someone else's body at night in order to become something else, at least for a while.

But when a sudden, brutal loss severs her ties with someone she loves, Amelia sets off on a seventy-two-hour mission to outrun her grief - skipping out on the funeral, running away to stay with her father in Tasmania and experimenting on the local BDSM scene. There, she learns more about sex, death, grief and the different ways pain works its way through the body.

It'll take a pair of fathers, a bruising encounter with a stranger and recognition of her own body's limits to bring Amelia back to herself.

Deadpan, wise and heartbreakingly funny, Ella Baxter's New Animal is a stunning debut.

'New Animal is a wild, moving and original debut - and like the best bits of sex and funerals, it's very, very funny.' - Robert Lukins

'Sex, death, humour, and heart - this novel has it all.' - Laura Elizabeth Woollett

'... deeply uncomfortable, laugh-out-loud funny and devastatingly moving...' - Erin Hortle

Author Bio

Ella Baxter is a writer and artist living on unceded land of the Wurundjeri people. She has had poetry published in Spineless Wonders, Gargouille Literary Journal, and Bowen St Press. Her sculptures have been exhibited in site specific locations around Victoria, as well as at Gasworks Arts Park, and featured in Beyond Words Literary Magazine. In her spare time she runs a small business making bespoke death shrouds. Her debut novel, New Animal, was published by Allen and Unwin in 2021. She is currently writing her second novel, Woo Woo.