The New York Times - Sarah Lyall
The plot that unfurls seems simple, familiar…a friendship based on getting wasted and wreaking 50 kinds of havoc is threatened when one of its participants has to sober up and settle down. What makes this novel so fresh are the unexpected turns the story takes and the vividness, urgency and idiosyncratic panache of Ms. Unsworth's writing…[Animals is] an emotionally complex and often go-for-broke-witty book about the difficulty of letting go, of making choices for yourself, of discovering that the relationships you cling to hardest may be the ones that damage you most.
The New York Times Book Review - Mira Jacob
Unsworth's strength is her bawdiness, her delight in language, her ability to build characters and pivot expertly between the tragic and the comic.
Publishers Weekly
★ 10/19/2015
A woman is torn between her best friend and her fiancé in this delayed-coming-of-age novel filled with debauchery and friendship. Laura and Tyler live in squalor in Manchester. They're overeducated, underemployed, and devoted to excess even though their friends set aside the partying life years earlier. Now 32, Laura does the least amount of work she can get away with at her job and is similarly apathetic about writing Bacon, her novel about a priest who falls in love with a talking pig. She is engaged to Jim, a teetotaling classical pianist who is often on the road. If Jim acts as Laura's superego—quietly condemning her over-indulgence—Tyler is all id, sort of like a younger version of Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, and not all that quietly trying to sabotage Laura's upcoming wedding. Unsworth's writing is vividly vulgar, outrageously physical, and darkly funny. Portrayals of women behaving badly are often meant to be funny, but Tyler's aggressive self-destructiveness worries, even shocks, creating a memorable, deceptively poignant novel. Agent: Clare Conville, Conville and Walsh Literary Agency. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
Featured as one of The Huffington Post's “15 Fantastic Books By Women to Read This Fall”
Praise for Animals
“[By Emma Jane Unsworth, a] young British writer full of talent, [Animals] is an emotionally complex and often go-for-broke-witty book about the difficulty of letting go, of making choices for yourself, of discovering that the relationships you cling to hardest may be the ones that damage you most."
— The New York Times
"Three cheers for this take of alcoholic love between platonic soul mates."
—Lena Dunham, author of Not that Kind of Girl
“[Animals] is more complex than an ode to the party or a call to responsible adulthood, and [Unsworth’s] characters shine with humanity.”
—The New Yorker
"A fevered tale of female friendship."
—The Observer
"Hilarious, moving, and poetic."
—Glamour Magazine
"Unsworth is a name to watch ... Animals is more than a hymn to partygoing - it is a sharp study of the endurance of female friendship over romantic entanglements and life's challenges."
—Financial Times
"Featuring two women in their early thirties whose voracious appetite for wine make Dionysus look like a lightweight...Unsworth captures the destabilizing doubts that your late twenties/early thirties can trigger."
—The Independent
"This is a book you'll be talking about for years to come. It marks Unsworth as a tremendous talent."
—The Guardian
“An utterly triumphant ode to female friendship, in all its intense, messy and powerful beauty."
—Elle
author of The Last Werewolf Glen Duncan
Casually high on insight, mercifully low on decorum, Animals is vital, funny, poignant and true. If you’re looking for talent, style and the deep wisdom of misbehaviour, read it.
BookCunt blog
This is a book that will make you laugh and make you think. It’s a story about friendship and growing up, and the fun that can be had and the s**t that you sometimes have to leave behind.
Big Issue
It’s not exactly subtle, but there is an irrepressible energy and verve to Animals, a veracity to Unsworth’s no-bulls**t prose and her main characters’ barfly pseudo-philosophising, that makes the whole thing crack along like a Friday night pub crawl. Laura and Tyler are such engaging characters that it’s hard to read Animals without cracking open a bottle of wine and joining the madness.
Twin Magazine Blog
Animals looks like a New Order record, its narrative fuelled by cheap white wine, the non-logic of the always-intoxicated and the sensuously evocative language of a writer who’s been there....but it’s ultimately a sobering and tender read.
Independent
Drink, drugs, men, more drink, more drugs. That’s the heartbeat of this wham-bam, helter-skelter account of female friendship, featuring two women in their early thirties whose voracious appetite for wine makes Dionysus look like a lightweight.
Glamour
Hilarious, moving and poetic.
New Statesman
Unsworth is a bright talent.
Helen Walsh
A hilarious, madcap meditation on grown ups who are not quite ready to grow up. Her writing is as brilliantly inventive as her characters’ transgressions.
John Niven
A devilish tale, spun in angelic prose.
The Observer
A fresh, albeit slightly fevered, depiction of female friendships and modern femininity in which traditional romantic entanglements take second place.
Stylist (UK)
What also makes Animals so fresh - apart from Emma Jane Unsworth ‘s lovely turn of phrase and ability to resuscitate the worst hangover you’ve ever had - is just how filthy these girls are.
Bath Chronicle
A speedy, exciting tale of female friendship.
Nathan Filer
Savagely funny, clever and wise. If it’s not an instant cult classic I’m leaving the cult.
Caitlin Moran
I wish I had written this book . . . Withnail with girls.
Red Online
Told through wild nights and the chaos of life as a thirty-something, this ode to female friendship is number one on my summer reading wish list.
Lauren Beukes
Brutally funny and heartfelt. I loved it.
Matt Haig
Animals is a riot. A kind of drunker, swearier Girls. I loved it.
The Guardian
Animals beautifully navigates the complexities of intimate relationships. Never cloying or mawkish, it communicates vulnerability, dependence and tenderness, often in a single dazzling line.
The List
Gloriously debauched and wonderfully touching...a gripping, raucous read from one of Britain’s most promising young writers.
Jenn Ashworth
Stunningly brilliant.
Independent Whig.
Drink, drugs, men, more drink, more drugs. That’s the heartbeat of this wham-bam, helter-skelter account of female friendship, featuring two women in their early thirties whose voracious appetite for wine makes Dionysus look like a lightweight.
Library Journal
11/01/2015
Unsworth follows up her Betty Trask Award-winning debut, Hungry, the Stars and Everything, with a tale of female friendship. Wannabe novelist Laura focuses most of her energies on best friend Tyler, a let's-party-until-we-drop sort with whom she consumes prodigious quantities of alcohol. With all their wild ways, there's barely room for Jim, the classical pianist Laura plans to marry. (There's an unlikely couple.) Jim has stopped drinking for the sake of his career and wants Laura to get a grip, but this is not a novel of one young woman's finding the light. At the bittersweet end, Laura is true to herself. VERDICT Darkly hilarious, though it does sober up, this novel is a twentysomething cri de coeur that enlightens even as it exasperates.
Kirkus Reviews
2015-07-15
In Unsworth's (Hungry, the Stars and Everything, 2012) second novel, two women confront the end of their carefree, party-going 20s. Laura Joyce and Tyler Johnson have been inseparable since their early 20s. Within their apartment, they've cultivated the kind of female friendship that's closer to a unified existence, and they're as comfortable quoting Yeats to one another as they are drinking until the sun comes up. But when Laura, who works at a call center but dreams of becoming a writer, gets engaged to straight-laced classical pianist Jim, a shadow is thrown over their relationship. Jim has given up the lifestyle of drinking and partying, and as his career progresses, he encourages Laura to do the same. Unorthodox Tyler, however, maintains her belief that "Sharing your life with someone is like Marmite. It's FUCKING SHIT," and she holds fast to her friendship with Laura and their wild, drug-filled nights out. Real life intrudes as Laura's wedding draws closer, Tyler's sister has a baby, and the two debate some of life's bigger questions—what love, romance, and relationships really mean and whether growing up is inevitable. After arguments and a disastrous bar brawl drive a wedge between them, Laura is certain she can't keep up with Tyler forever, but can she let her go entirely? As Unsworth charts Laura's glittery nights out with Tyler and clashes with Jim, the book's constant succession of parties and hangovers can get repetitive, but surprisingly deep insights emerge in between. As she fights with Jim, Laura wants to accuse her fiance of losing his spontaneity but muses, "Hadn't I fallen for his fixedness, his pin-like regard?...Was that what happened: the things you fell in love with became the very things that repelled you, in the end?" While leveled at Jim, on a deeper level the question is also directed at Tyler and speaks to the book's moving examination of friendship and whether it can survive as time passes, people change, and the responsibilities of adulthood beckon. A deep, honest meditation on all the drama and intimacy of female friendships.
