Quick Take
- Narration: Mark Bramhall is exceptional, navigating the tonal shifts between cemetery-narrated dark comedy and genuine grief with the precision this unusual novel demands.
- Themes: Opioid crisis and grief, familial expectations versus individual paths, the persistence of the dead among the living
- Mood: Darkly funny and quietly devastating, like attending a funeral where someone keeps telling the right kind of joke
- Verdict: An inventive tragicomedy that earns its quirks through real emotional honesty, and one of the more memorable listening experiences in contemporary literary fiction.
I was halfway through my Saturday morning walk when Unlikely Animals shifted on me. I had been enjoying it as a piece of clever small-town literary fiction, the kind of book that accumulates charming eccentricities the way Everton, New Hampshire accumulates snow. Then Annie Hartnett pivoted to the opioid crisis, to a missing young woman that no one in the police department cares enough to look for because she is an addict, and I found myself standing on a sidewalk blinking. That tonal modulation, from whimsical to quietly devastating, is something Hartnett manages throughout the book, and it is what makes Unlikely Animals genuinely interesting rather than merely charming.
The premise is baroque but purposeful. Emma Starling drops out of medical school in California, losing the healing ability she was born with somewhere between there and here, and returns to Everton to care for her father Clive, who is dying of a mysterious brain disease that causes hallucinations and conversations with the ghost of Ernest Harold Baynes, a real nineteenth-century naturalist famous for letting wild animals live in his house. The dead narrate the book from Maple Street Cemetery. It is that kind of novel. If any part of that description makes you want to step back, you should listen to something else. If it makes you curious, Hartnett earns every bit of the strangeness.
Our Take on Unlikely Animals
The cemetery chorus device is the book’s most audacious choice. The dead of Everton narrate events they witness with the collective voice of a town’s accumulated memory, and they bring a quality to the observation that the living characters cannot have: perspective, removed from urgency, capable of seeing the shape of what is happening without being inside it. It should feel gimmicky. In practice, it gives the book a philosophical undertow that the straight narrative alone could not achieve. Hartnett clearly had Wilder’s Our Town somewhere in her mind when she built this, and the echoes are conscious and controlled.
Mark Bramhall’s narration is precisely right for this material. The tonal range required here is significant: the dead need a different register than Emma’s exhausted, guarded present-tense, which needs to be different from Clive’s hallucination sequences, which need something different again. Bramhall handles all of it. His voice carries authority without weight, which is exactly what the cemetery chapters need, and he has the restraint not to push the comedy so hard that it undermines the genuine grief underneath.
Why Listen to Unlikely Animals
One reviewer described this as the strangest but still charming novel they had ever read, and another said Hartnett uses tough topics with sensitivity and thought. Both of these are accurate. The opioid material is not handled with the earnest gravity of issue fiction, but it is not deployed for shock either. Emma’s missing friend, the woman the police do not bother to look for, is the moral center of the book in a way that becomes clear gradually. The Starlings and their comedic dysfunction are the frame; the question of who society decides is worth searching for is the actual subject.
Annie Hartnett’s 2016 debut Rabbit Cake established her as a writer drawn to the intersection of grief and the absurd, and Unlikely Animals builds on that territory with more scope and more formal ambition. The parallel development of the naturalist ghost subplot and the missing friend investigation is impressively managed for a novel this tonally varied. At ten hours and forty-two minutes, there is room to breathe, and the story benefits from not being compressed.
What to Watch For in Unlikely Animals
The book takes time to assemble. One reviewer acknowledged it took longer to get into than expected while all the moving parts settled into relation to each other. The first act requires some patience as the Starling family dynamics, the Baynes ghost subplot, the opioid crisis background, and the cemetery narrator all need to establish themselves before Hartnett can play them against each other. This is not a page-turner structure in the thriller sense. It is a novel that accumulates emotional force through density and specificity, and the payoff in the final third is significant.
A minority of readers found the ensemble approach frustrating, citing too many subplots without sufficient resolution. This is a reasonable critique of a novel this ambitious in scope. Hartnett is more interested in the texture of a community in crisis than in tying every thread to a satisfying conclusion, and listeners who require narrative tidiness will find the ending somewhat open.
Who Should Listen to Unlikely Animals
Readers who loved A Man Called Ove for its combination of comedy and unexpected grief, or who responded to the tonal complexity of Fredrik Backman’s work more broadly, will find this familiar and rewarding. Literary fiction listeners who appreciate formally inventive narration and are not deterred by non-linear assembly will get the most from it. The small-town New England setting gives it a specific texture that fans of Elizabeth Strout will recognize. Anyone who needs a clear genre classification before committing should know this is tragicomedy with literary ambition, not cozy fiction with dark elements.
Frequently Asked Questions
How significant is the opioid crisis as a subject in Unlikely Animals, and is it handled sensitively?
It is genuinely central to the book’s moral argument rather than being background texture. Emma’s missing high school friend is dismissed by the police because she is an addict, and the novel’s climactic momentum builds around Emma and her father being the only people who treat this missing woman as worth looking for. Hartnett handles the subject with specificity and genuine feeling, not as an issue-fiction platform.
Does the cemetery narrator device work throughout the book or does it feel like a gimmick that outstays its welcome?
Hartnett earns it throughout. The dead of Maple Street Cemetery observe events with the detached perspective of accumulated community memory, and this creates a philosophical distance that gives the tragedy in the book room to breathe. It works because Hartnett keeps it thematically purposeful rather than decorative. The comparison to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is apt.
Is Mark Bramhall’s narration well-suited to the tonal shifts between comedy and grief?
He is exceptional in this role. The novel requires him to shift between the wry, slightly remote voice of the cemetery narration, Emma’s exhausted present-tense, and Clive’s hallucination sequences, among others. Bramhall has the restraint not to push the comedy so hard that it undercuts the genuine sorrow beneath it, which is the precise balance Hartnett’s writing requires.
Should I read Annie Hartnett’s debut Rabbit Cake before Unlikely Animals?
No. They share thematic preoccupations, particularly the intersection of grief and the absurd, and a similar small-town New England sensibility, but they are fully independent novels. Reading Rabbit Cake will give you a richer sense of Hartnett’s development as a writer, but Unlikely Animals stands completely on its own.
