THE PETTING ZOOS

For fans of literary fiction with speculative and suspense elements – including Blindness by José Saramago and Never Let Me Goby KazuoIshiguro, and fans of the HBO series The Leftovers – comes THE PETTING ZOOS,a debut novel by K.S. Covert.

Unsettling, philosophical and erotic by turns, this eerily prescient novel set a decade after a pandemic, but before the removal of mask-and-glove laws, looks at the necessity of human contact and the chaos that results from its scarcity. Not all the victims of the pandemic died. Some just lost their lives. Now the biggest threat is isolation. Lily has been a hermit since her best friend, Sophie, abandoned her near-death just before the vaccine came online. But she is forced out of isolation when her editor assigns her a story about the petting zoos, a dangerous underground network of places where people go to touch and be touchedby strangers.
As Lily goes deeper into the zoos, and her relationship with the man who runs them, she rediscovers herself. But the more she opens up, the more vulnerable she becomes, forcing her to reckon with a dependency on human touch that comes at the expense of human connection.

K.S. COVERT is a proud native of Nova Scotia, who has lived away from the ocean for too long. A former journalist she now works in communications. This is her first novel, she is at work on her next