ANIMAL INSTINCT

From the acclaimed, award-winning author comes a darkly humorous and tantalizing portrait of sex, divorce, and midlife in a pandemic world, perfect for readers of Fleishmann Is in Trouble and Big Swiss.

It's spring of 2020 and Rachel Bloomstein, mother of three, recent divorcee, and Brooklynite is stuck inside. But her newly awakened sexual desire, long dormant in her marriage, refuses to be trapped. Despite the sirens, the masks, the completely uncharted territory in which the world finds itself, Rachel's lust for life, and for new people, can't be dampened. Leaning on her best friend Lulu to show her the ropes, Rachel dips a toe in the online dating world, swiping left and right until: park bench dates with younger men, ongoing flirtations with beautiful women, and finally, actual, in-person sex. Soon, though, she begins to fantasize: What if she could pluck all the best qualities of everyone she's meeting and combine them into one absolutely perfect person, ideally suited to her emotional needs. Enter: Frankie, an AI chatbot she programs with all the good parts of dating in middle age... and some of the bad. As Rachel plays Dr. Frankenstein with Frankie, tweaking her fantasy to her heart's content, she begins to realize she can't reprogram her ex-husband, or her children, or her friends, or the roster of paramours that's grown unwieldy. Perhaps real life has more in store for Rachel than she could ever program for herself. An honest look at contemporary marriage, ANIMAL INSTINCT is a provocative tale of one woman's burgeoning freedom, our fraught relationship with technology, and a snapshot of life at its most fragile and precious. Amy Shearn is the author of the critically acclaimed novels UNSEEN CITY (Red Hen Press), THE MERMAID OF BROOKLYN (Touchstone), and HOW FAR IS THE OCEAN FROM HERE (Crown). She has worked as an editor for Medium, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, Oprah, Coastal Living, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Catapult, The Millions, and many other publications. Amy received a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and has been awarded residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm, The Unruly Retreat, The Cabins, and the self-directed Artist Residency in Motherhood. She has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and currently lives in Brooklyn with her two children.