To my great delight, while I was reading the thoroughly researched and transcendent The White Bone I felt, almost completely, that I was an elephant. Every time I hear about their memories, their communities, or their mourning procedures, I want to know, so desperately, what they think about things. The sea, the dynamic coast, the constant shifting of the ice-all were rendered with such richness that I felt I was there myself. In addition to the moving story of Nau and her descendants, I loved how prominently the landscape was featured in this book. Rytkheu, a Chukchi writer, weaves Chuchki narrative forms into both a reimagining of the origin story of his people and a warning to us all about the devastation that comes from forgetting our connection to our environment. And every evening, he returns to the sea and his creature form, until the winter ice approaches and Reu must choose between leaving Nau to travel with his whale kin to southern waters, or staying on land as a man forever. Emerging from the glittering water and transforming into a man called Reu, the whale visits Nau every day. “Nau was fast breeze, green grass, wet shingle, high cloud, and endless blue sky, herself and all these things at once.” Soon, she falls in love with a whale. When the Whales Leave is a gorgeous and dreamlike tale of Nau, a solitary woman living on a narrow spit between a lagoon and the Arctic sea, enmeshed with the earth around her. When the Whales Leave by Yuri Rytkheu, translated by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse In the end, I saw Poonachi clearly as the treasure she always was.

I found myself deeply invested in Poonachi and the family that raised her, and I loved in particular how this novel was written so that all of their lives were intimately intertwined. Rather, her loves, her hopes, and her connections are treated with the same richness as her human companions. And we don’t see Poonachi as merely a marginal animal flitting in and out of human lives. What follows is a sweeping story about agrarian life in South India, encompassing examinations of caste oppression and colorism, and the impact of government regulation on villagers, all woven together with Poonachi’s life as a goat. Placing the goat in the old man’s hand, “t first, it felt as if a hammer had grazed his hand the next moment, he found a flower in his palm.” The farmer brings the baby goat – the kid – home to his wife, who names her Poonachi. “Only a kind-hearted man can have my baby,” says the giant, offering this seventh, and smallest, goat of a litter. In South India, in a dry year, an old farmer sits to gaze at a sunset after harvest, when a giant approaches and offers him a black goat. The Story of a Goat by Perumal Murugan, translated by N Kalyan Raman That our lives, however sterile they may become, are part of the complex and ever-changing fabric of the environment around us. But all of these books, by directing our gaze to the animal kingdom, insist that we humans remember that we are not alone. In some, humanity is pushed to the margins, in others human influence is the center of the story (and in one, humans are replaced entirely by animals). They are funny, they are heartbreaking, they are hypnotic, and they are wild.

The books listed below all feature animals as prominent characters. Naturally, because I love writing from an animal perspective, I absolutely adore books that put animals at the center of their narratives.

Endless sky ships list