The Animal on the Rock

�The sun gives me comfort. The temperature outside calibrates the temperature of my body, and I know I am immortal when I'm on a rock. After Irma's mother dies, she boards a plane to the coast. Soon she is consumed by strange dreams and irrational fears, and her body begins to�transform in ways as unexpected as they are natural. The skin over her joints grows thick and scaly, her�eyes take on a yellow gleam, and the border between reality and delirium becomes first elastic, then irrelevant. As the world around her tips out of balance-the weather turning volatile, strangers issuing cryptic warnings-she returns again and again to the rock where she undergoes metamorphosis: a series of radical mutations that enable her to survive. Elemental and prophetic, intimate and universal,�The Animal on the Rock�bears witness to the terror and magnificence of being a child, a parent, a changing animal. A profoundly biological and introspective novel that lies somewhere between clinical record and fever dream.