★已授權美、澳！

It is New Year's Eve, 1990, in a small town in south-east Australia. Ru's father, Jack, one of thousands of Australians once conscripted to serve in the Vietnam war, has disappeared. This time Ru thinks he might be gone for good. As rumours spread of a huge black cat stalking the landscape beyond their door, the rest of the family is barely holding on. Ru’s sister, Lani, is throwing herself into sex, drugs, and dangerous company. Their mother, Evelyn, is escaping into memories of a more vibrant youth. And meanwhile there is Les, Jack’s inscrutable brother, who seems to move through their lives like a ghost, winning both trust and suspicion. A LOVING, FAITHFUL ANIMAL is an incandescent portrait of one family searching for what may yet be redeemable from the ruins of war. Tender, brutal, and heart-stopping in its beauty, this novel marks the arrival in the United States of one of Australia’s most extraordinary young writers.

 

Josephine Rowe was born in 1984 in Rockhampton, Australia, and grew up in Melbourne. In the U.S. her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Narrative, The Scofield, and the Paris Review Daily. She holds fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Program in fiction at Stanford University, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the Omi International Arts Center, and Yaddo. In 2016, her fiction won the Elizabeth Jolley Prize in Australia. She lives in Tasmania.

 

“A novel of startling imagery and power”──Chris Womersley, author of Bereft and winner of the 2011 Indie Award for Fiction

“Rowe’s language is trance-inducing. Do right by yourself, nest down and prepare to be swept away by these characters, their respective dilapidations, in this mesmerizing, incandescent novel. Masterful.”──Brendan Jones, author of The Alaskan Laundry

“Rowe makes it clear from the first para- graph of this clenched, resolute study of family damage that sentiment has no place here. She will reveal something harder and truer.”──Kate Holden, for Australian Book Review

“Brutal and tender, this is a dark domestic drama battling with the wreckage of the Vietnam War”──Monocle Magazine