A young congressman discovers a mysterious stuffed aardvark on his doorstep and sets out on a journey to find out what it means in this "weird, wonderful" novel about the secrets we keep from ourselves and their history-shaping consequences (Esquire).
It's early one morning on a hot day in August, and millennial congressman Alexander Paine Wilson (R), planning his first reelection campaign and in deep denial about his sexuality, receives a mysterious, over-sized FedEx delivery on his front stoop. Inside is a gigantic taxidermied aardvark.
This outrageous, edge-of-your-seat novel hurtles between contemporary Washington, D.C., where Wilson tries to get rid of the unsightly beast before it destroys his career, and Victorian England--where we meet Titus Downing, the taxidermist who stuffed the aardvark, and Richard Ostlet, the naturalist who hunted her. Our present world, we begin to see, has been shaped in profound and disturbing ways by the secret that binds these men.
At once a ghost story, a love story, and a stunningly prescient political satire, Enter the Aardvark confronts the consequences of repressed male love meeting oppressive male power, and is a searing condemnation of our current American blindness. It is also that rarest of creatures: a work of art so utterly original and masterfully built that it seems to have spring fully formed from its visionary maker's head.
Genre: Literary Fiction
It's early one morning on a hot day in August, and millennial congressman Alexander Paine Wilson (R), planning his first reelection campaign and in deep denial about his sexuality, receives a mysterious, over-sized FedEx delivery on his front stoop. Inside is a gigantic taxidermied aardvark.
This outrageous, edge-of-your-seat novel hurtles between contemporary Washington, D.C., where Wilson tries to get rid of the unsightly beast before it destroys his career, and Victorian England--where we meet Titus Downing, the taxidermist who stuffed the aardvark, and Richard Ostlet, the naturalist who hunted her. Our present world, we begin to see, has been shaped in profound and disturbing ways by the secret that binds these men.
At once a ghost story, a love story, and a stunningly prescient political satire, Enter the Aardvark confronts the consequences of repressed male love meeting oppressive male power, and is a searing condemnation of our current American blindness. It is also that rarest of creatures: a work of art so utterly original and masterfully built that it seems to have spring fully formed from its visionary maker's head.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"It’s a long time since I have enjoyed a novel so much. Fresh, witty and smart it also has a heart. What more could you want? And who would have thought that you could become emotionally attached to a stuffed aardvark?" - Kate Atkinson
"Enter the Aardvark is one wild ride: a condemnation, a haunting, a song of love, a madcap political thriller - and it is absolutely unputdownable." - Laura van den Berg
"I've been waiting a long time for a book like Jessica Anthony's Enter the Aardvark, a book that not only manages to bridge supposedly unbridgeable divides in politics, in time, in geography, in love and sex, but also manages to do so by way of a time-traveling taxidermied aardvark. If that sounds unlikely, well, yes, exactly, that's why I've been waiting for so long for it?this unlikely, hilarious, moving, ingenious book. Enter the Aardvark is an absolute original." - Brock Clarke
"Enter Jessica Anthony. With her highly inventive, ever attentive, and morally serious (as all great comedy must be) Enter the Aardvark, she estranges all over again our deplorable political moment, and thereby helps make it bearable." - Joshua Ferris
"Mischievously zoological and darkly satirical – a brilliant novel." - John Ironmonger
"Jessica Anthony is a writer possessed of mind-bending talents." - Heidi Julavits
"The feat of a virtuoso stylist who makes the wildly impossible seem everyday. Anthony stabs with tenderness, drags us through the purifying muck of love, and writes a refrain that does not repeat. A novel of riotous longing echoing across our continents and eras." - Salvador Plascencia
"A feverish, rollicking beast of a book. Totally assured, completely unpredictable, Jessica Anthony has created a true original." - Simon Wroe
"Enter the Aardvark is one wild ride: a condemnation, a haunting, a song of love, a madcap political thriller - and it is absolutely unputdownable." - Laura van den Berg
"I've been waiting a long time for a book like Jessica Anthony's Enter the Aardvark, a book that not only manages to bridge supposedly unbridgeable divides in politics, in time, in geography, in love and sex, but also manages to do so by way of a time-traveling taxidermied aardvark. If that sounds unlikely, well, yes, exactly, that's why I've been waiting for so long for it?this unlikely, hilarious, moving, ingenious book. Enter the Aardvark is an absolute original." - Brock Clarke
"Enter Jessica Anthony. With her highly inventive, ever attentive, and morally serious (as all great comedy must be) Enter the Aardvark, she estranges all over again our deplorable political moment, and thereby helps make it bearable." - Joshua Ferris
"Mischievously zoological and darkly satirical – a brilliant novel." - John Ironmonger
"Jessica Anthony is a writer possessed of mind-bending talents." - Heidi Julavits
"The feat of a virtuoso stylist who makes the wildly impossible seem everyday. Anthony stabs with tenderness, drags us through the purifying muck of love, and writes a refrain that does not repeat. A novel of riotous longing echoing across our continents and eras." - Salvador Plascencia
"A feverish, rollicking beast of a book. Totally assured, completely unpredictable, Jessica Anthony has created a true original." - Simon Wroe
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