Annie Hartnett

The dead of Maple Street Cemetery narrate Unlikely Animals (2022), reading the thoughts of the living in Everton, a New Hampshire town Annie Hartnett invented and then filled with trouble. Emma Starling comes home from a medical degree she has abandoned. Her father Clive is dying of a brain disease that makes him see small animals and the ghost of Ernest Harold Baynes, a naturalist who genuinely did let wild creatures live in his house. Her brother is out of rehab, and a school friend has vanished with nobody looking for her. Hartnett's first novel, Rabbit Cake (2017), came from Tin House and reached the New England Book Award final. She holds an MFA from Alabama plus degrees from Hamilton College and Middlebury's Bread Loaf School of English, teaches at GrubStreet in Boston, and co-hosts the podcast Good Moms on Paper. Unlikely Animals won the Julia Ward Howe Prize.