The Last Animal - Paperback

by Ramona Ausubel (Author)

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"Whip-smart and compulsively readable. . . both a wildly entertaining adventure story and a meditation on what it means to love your children--fiercely and imperfectly."--Oprah Daily

"Springs alive to explore questions that stump scientists and families, problems of the head and the heart."--Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"A full-hearted portrait of sisterhood, family and the ways we process grief. Charming, wry, and original." --People

TWO SISTERS, ONE MOM, AND ONE WOOLLY SECRET.

Teenage sisters Eve and Vera never imagined their summer vacation would be spent in the Arctic, tagging along on their mother's scientific expedition. But there's a lot about their lives lately that hasn't been going as planned, and truth be told, their single mother might not be so happy either.

Now in Siberia with a bunch of serious biologists, Eve and Vera are just bored enough to cause trouble. Fooling around in the permafrost, they accidentally discover a perfectly preserved, four-thousand-year-old baby mammoth, and things finally start to get interesting. The discovery sets off a surprising chain of events, leading mother and daughters to go rogue, pinging from the slopes of Siberia to the shores of Iceland to an exotic animal farm in Italy, and resulting in the birth of a creature that could change the world--or at least this family.

The Last Animal takes readers on a wild, entertaining, and refreshingly different kind of journey, one that explores the possibilities and perils of the human imagination on a changing planet, what it's like to be a woman in a field dominated by men, and how a wondrous discovery can best be enjoyed with family. Even teenagers.

Author Biography

Ramona Ausubel is the author of two novels and two story collections, among them Awayland and Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty. Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, she has been long-listed for the Story Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR's Selected Shorts, and elsewhere.