Wild Life
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Wild Life
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By:
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Amanda Leduc
About this listen
Amanda Leduc’s dazzling new novel follows two walking, talking hyenas as they interact with humans over decades. Blurring the line between human and animal, these strange messengers reveal what is possible when the cages that contain us are broken.
In 19th-century Scotland, young Josiah is banished by his father for seeing the divine in the animals around him and sent to Siberia with a small Christian mission to purge such nonsense from his soul. Miserably scrubbing the chapel floor one night, Josiah is visited by what he thinks is God in animal form. When his saviours, a hyena and her mate, rescue him from a natural disaster that kills the other missionaries and then bring him safely home, he founds a religion based on his belief that God granted speech to the hyenas as part of a divine plan to heal and exalt the human race.
The hyena pair, Barbara and Kendrith, aren't so sure that Josiah has it right. But with their beautiful strangeness, they utterly transform the people they encounter over succeeding generations. As Josiah's church gathers adherents, more and more animals start to speak to humans—from signing baby gorillas to seductive alligators. At first one or two rebellious pets make a break for freedom, but then comes a mass exodus of all animals held captive, forcing people to contend with a wildness in themselves they have spent millennia denying. The end of this remarkable fairytale is both joyful and devastating, completely dissolving the boundary between what's "human" and what's "animal."
©2025 Amanda Leduc (P)2025 Random House CanadaCritic reviews
"Brilliant, precious, incomparable. Beautiful, wondrous, affirming. These words immediately come to mind when I think of Wild Life, and still they do not fully express how I feel about this book. This novel moved me in ways I haven't been moved by a book in years. Amanda Leduc uses the fantastic as a lens through which to examine her characters' most personal, vulnerable feelings and fears. Yet, even amongst the likes of talking hyenas and mysteriously appearing doves and beanstalks, we never lose sight of the importance of even the smallest, most seemingly mundane moments. After all, as this novel so deftly reminds us, these are the types of moments that make up the tapestry of each of our lives, from which we inevitably derive meaning. With her use of innovative forms, imaginative stories and unforgettable characters, Leduc helps us to understand the beauty and significance of each of our own wild lives. If there is any justice in this world, this book will be hailed as a modern classic for decades to come."—Alicia Elliott, author of And Then She Fell
“A brilliant work of modern myth-making, Amanda Leduc’s newest novel invites us to embrace the ferocity, vulnerability and tenacity that is at the heart of what makes us human. Wild Life should be savoured and devoured.”—Karen McBride, author of Crow Winter
“I was enthralled. Leduc hasn’t just penned a terrific tale she's introduced us to a remarkable new literary species: the novel of the human-as-animal. Wild Life is wild and woolly and marvelous, a feral fable about the outsider who’s been inside of us all along: our own creaturely nature. Handle with wonder.”—Thomas Wharton, author of The Book of Rain