ANIMALIA

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, trans. Frank Wynne (Fitzcarraldo)

Del Amo’s first work translated into English, Animalia follows the lives of a modest peasant family over the course of nearly a century, as they grow their rural smallholding in the backlands of France into a modern intensive pig farm. Mulling on man’s relationship to his environment and the other creatures in his ‘care’, Del Amo’s forte is how he creates a near tangible sense of the humdrum and filth of farm life through his dense, detailed descriptions. The prose is rich like the soil it is so strongly rooted within, and practically oozing with evocations of the grubby animal nature of the intensely interwoven lives of man, earth, and beast – something we often find all too easy to forget. Organic and unforgiving, this is rarely an easy read, but undoubtedly an absorbing and timely one. words Dafydd Haine

Price: £12.99. Info: www.fitzcarraldoeditions.com