Unlikely Animals

by Annie Hartnett · 2022

When Emma Starling, a once‑promising medical student turned reluctant caretaker, returns to the sleepy town of Everton, New Hampshire, she finds herself thrust into a world where grief, mystery, and the uncanny intertwine. Her dying father, Clive, is haunted by visions of tiny animals and the ghost of 19th‑century naturalist Ernest Harold Baynes, who offers cryptic advice on how to spend his final days. As Emma navigates her father's strange hallucinations, her own family’s tangled past, and the disappearance of her high‑school best friend—ignored by a disinterested police force—she discovers that the line between life and death is far more porous than she ever imagined. Filled with humor, heartache, and a cast of off‑beat characters, this tragicomic novel explores how love, loss, and a touch of the supernatural can reshape the paths we thought were set in stone.