Canongate snares Carew's book on beasts

Canongate has snapped up Beastly: A New History of Animals and Us by Keggie Carew, Costa-winning author of Dadland (Vintage).

World rights were acquired by Simon Thorogood, editorial director, from Patrick Walsh at PEW Literary. Abrams has already acquired US rights. Publication is slated for April 2023.

Beastly charts the 40,000-year story of animals and humans’ co-existence. "With characteristic wit and insight, Keggie goes in search of our most revealing encounters across the species divide," the synopsis reads. "In an epic of immense reach, we are thrown headlong into the mind-blowing pageant of life. A zoologist watches a fish make a decision. A whale mimics the voice of a human. In a Polish forest a young woman befriends a boar. Teeming with astonishing true stories, Beastly reframes what it means to be human in our wild world – and how animals are the key to our survival."

Thorogood said: "Keggie’s book is, on the one hand, a love letter: to our creaturely kin, and to those humans who have shown us an alternative and better way ahead. It is also a rallying cry to understand how nature works and lays out the consequences of not understanding — but more than anything, Beastly is a profound, joyful, fearful, elegiac, deeply researched, rich and inspiring triumph of a book."

Carew added: "Is there a story more important than the human relationship with the animal world? I don’t think so. How have we failed to convey the magnitude of this story, with all the ramifications for us? Everything comes back to our paradoxical relationship with the planet’s other inhabitants. Only life can support life. My quest was to unravel how we got here, and to find better paths ahead."