Only the Animals is, perhaps, one of the most unusual collections of short stories that I have read in quite some time. Each story is told from the perspective of a different animal and tells a little bit about their lives (and their deaths,) and unique relationships with humans, using various points in modern history as a backdrop.

ONLY THE ANIMALS suggests an authenticity in animals that humans can only wonder at. From this position of authentic frankness, each of the animals in the stories observes humans in all their glory and all their unequalled depravity.

Only the Animals is filled with knowledge and wisdom and beauty. It leaves a strange and striking trace on its reader.” -- Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers. Winner of the inaugural Readings New Australian Writing Award 2014 (Read about the award in the Guardian, The Australian and The Age)

“Only the Animals” is a mystery thriller with two mysteries to solve: who killed Evelyne and why does the primal pull of love and sex lead people to commit immoral acts. If there was a ready answer...

Lensed by Patrick Ghiringhelli, who captures a sense of menace in the film’s pertinent winter storm sequences, Only the Animals is a return to narrative form for Moll, who excels at navigating the slippery slope of identity issues and fluctuating parameters of persona based on circumstance, opportunity or environment.

The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Dovey, Ceridwen. Only the Animals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. First American edition. Dovey's collection of short stories has no one coherent plot, but instead offers ten distinct narratives, each of which relates the story of its narrator's death.

All of which is a terrifically long preamble to Only the Animals, the second book by 35-year-old, South African-born, Australian- and American-educated Ceridwen Dovey. It follows her coolly confident debut novel, Blood Kin (2007), which captured the voices of three men in the thrall of a dictator in an unnamed country and was published in fifteen languages.

Only the Animals is a story told by the souls of ten dead animals. Each animal is caught up in a human conflict over the last century. They tell the stories of their deaths. A mussel speaks of its death in the Pearl Harbour bombings, an elephant from the 1987 Mozambique civil war,...

Only the Animals is a glorious imaginative leap, not into the minds of animals, but into our own . . . The most successful of the collection . . . is layered and astonishing and far and away the best thing I've read this year . . . Only the Animals makes much contemporary fiction seem stodgy and grey.”.