Animal Truth and Other Stories

The author of Invisible Beasts presents a time-bending collection of unsettling, sharp stories that straddle science and myth.

In Sharona Muir's unique eco-fabulist tales, fantastic animals and real science lead people through adventure and crisis to metamorphoses of the heart, and surprising truths about being human in the living system. In Menu: Extinction, an artist obsessed with the mass extinction of species creates a banquet installation in which a mermaid is served as a dish, while the banquet's imaginary, satanic chef stalks his wife. In Animal Truth, a fiercely independent woman researching the genome of a mysterious fish discovers that her lover-collaborator is her own son, given away at birth, and wrestles with the meanings of truth and motherhood. A time travelling billionaire escaping the complexities of contemporary life, in The Bath of Venus, has his heart broken by a beautiful creature in Earth's remote past. Each of these stories spins into gold the prickling straw of contemporary anxieties about our continued life on the planet. By turns playful, terrifying, haunting, and sensuous, the stories in this collection inspire wonder at the interwoven lives of human and nonhuman beings. They are both madly inventive and scientifically literate, and (to cite Anthony Doerr's praise for her work) absolutely original.