The Last Animal

A playful, witty, and resonant novel in which a single mother and her two teen daughters engage in a wild scientific experiment and discover themselves in the process, from the award-winning writer of Jane is a serious scientist on the cutting-edge team of a bold project looking to “de-extinct” the woolly mammoth. She’s privileged to have been sent to Siberia to hunt for ancient DNA, but there’s a catch: Jane’s two “tagalong” teen daughters are there with her in the Arctic, and they’re bored enough to cause trouble. Brilliant, fiery, sharp-tongued Eve is fifteen and willing to talk back to the male scientists in a way her mother is not. And sweet, thirteen-year-old Vera, who seems to absorb all the emotional burdens of her small family, just wants to be home in Berkeley, baking cakes and watching bad TV.; ; When Eve and Vera stumble upon a four-thousand-year-old baby mammoth that has been perfectly preserved, their discovery sets off a chain of events that pits Jane against her colleagues, and soon her status at the lab is tenuous at best. So what does a female scientist do when she’s a passionate devotee of her field but her gender and life history hold her back? She goes rogue. ; As Jane and her daughters ping-pong from the slopes of Siberia to a university in California, from the shores of Iceland to an exotic animal farm in Italy, <The Last Animal< takes readers on an expansive, bighearted journey that explores the possibility and peril of the human imagination on a changing planet, what it’s like to be a woman and a mother in a field dominated by men, and how a wondrous discovery can best be enjoyed with family. Even teenagers.;;

Autorentext
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.

Klappentext

**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.

  Leseprobe
  One

  In the Age of Extinction, two tagalong daughters traveled to the edge of the world with their mother to search the frozen earth for the bones of woolly mammoths.

  Eve was fifteen, reshaping herself more each day; Vera, just shy of thirteen, was a stubborn straight line. Jane, their mother, was a graduate student in paleobiology. Their father had died one year before, plunged into a shock-green mountain in a tiny car on a tiny road in Italy where he was doing research for an article. Now they were three. Girls, sad and angry and growing and trying. Mom, sad and angry and trying. Hauling their bodies across the scoop of sky to get to a bare place, a lost place where ancient beasts had once roamed. Somehow, they hoped, this trip would be the beginning of a new road. Gentler, ascending.

• • *

  Jane s professor had grown a beard for the trip to Siberia, and Todd, a postdoc, wore all tan safari clothing. Everything had several pockets and zipped into different configurations. In New York, Vera watched Todd zip off the legs to his pants and jog laps around the terminal in shorts and hiking boots, his stained white athletic socks like burned-down candles. The professor plugged in a full power strip to charge his computer, tablet and two phones and then ate three kale salads out of plastic to-go containers. He said, We re unlikely to get fresh veggies. I want to vitamin-load.

  Vera wondered if the professor was someone's father.

  During their five-hour layover in Moscow Jane brought blini with caviar on a real plate to the seats where her daughters were draped, sleepy and prickling.

  "Airport fish eggs, Mom, I don't know," Vera said. She wanted a burrito.

  "You're in junior high, what do you know? They're actually so good," Jane said, sour cream on her lips.

  Eve said, "I'm in high school, but I still find this embarrassing."

  Todd, in the next row of chairs, again zipped his pant legs off and slung them over his carry-on, then jogged the halls. Eve made a hand flourish and said, "Exhibit A." Vera watched the Russians watch Todd and it seemed possible that he alone might inspire a war between the two countries. Americans, if this was any indication, needed to be put out of their misery. It would have been a service.

  As the sun was going down, they boarded a plane that would take them from Moscow to Yakutsk. The stewardesses in stilettos served chicken cutlet and sweet wine. The plane crossed six time zones and they had only traveled two thirds of the way across Russia.

  Eve and Vera played a favorite game, Fortunately/Unfortunately, a game that had traveled with them on buses, planes, ships, trains all over the globe.

  "Once there were two sisters who wanted to run away," Eve started.

  Vera said, "Fortunately, they had large bags full of precious gems."

  "Unfortunately," Eve continued, "the gems were heavy and the girls couldn't carry them."

  "Fortunately, they came upon a cave where they could hide the bags until they had a way to transport them."

  "Unfortunately, there was a wild and ferocious bear living in the cave."

  Vera smiled at her older sister. "You always put a ferocious bear."

  "It's a classic."

  The story was, by design, endless. Meant to carry the girls across land and sea, every piece of bad news immediately followed by the upswing of salvation.

  It was morning again when they landed, dawn a fine pink stripe on the horizon. Vera felt broken by tiredness. She was not a person anymore but a hunger for sleep. The tarmac smelled like fire and melt.

  This was the coldest city on earth in winter and all the photos in the hotel lobby were of people with iced eyelashes, men in fur suits with fur hoods sell…