Filthy Animals

The first collection of stories from the author of REAL LIFE, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize and winner of the Foyles Fiction Book Of The Year In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, a young man tentatively engages with the world again. Recently discharged from hospital, Lionel meets two dance students at a party. Charles and Sophies relationship is difficult to read but Lionel is drawn to them both.

As he navigates their sexually fraught encounters he is forced to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness and to consider his return to life. Elsewhere, a little girl runs wild to the consternation of her childminder; unspoken frictions among a group of teenagers come to a vicious head on a winter night; and a woman dreads a first date only to find that something has cracked open. What connects these stories is the tension between the surface of things and the intensity of our inner worlds. With exquisite empathy, Brandon Taylor shows that though violence hovers at the edge of many encounters, so too does tenderness and love.

Advance praise for Filthy Animals: In these stories Brandon Taylor shows himself to be a formidable anatomist of the charged moment. The violence is unexpected, the sex complicated, the psychology acute. What I love most of all is the way he can capture the enormous distance between people standing a hairs breadth apart. --Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man A dazzling showcase for Brandon Taylors formidable talents his fierce intellect, his emotional and linguistic precision, his dry and unflinching humor. He is a writer of rare daring, his fiction a series of revelations. --Katie Kitamura, author of A Separation A writer who meets life with a rare combination of will, wonderment, temperament, and vitality. --Yiyun Li, author of Must I Go Superb work by a writer of extraordinary psychological insight. --Joseph ONeill, author of Netherland