“If there’s a more original novel published this year, I’ll be amazed.”—Suzi Feay, Financial Times

'A strange, moving novel . . . The Oldest Bitch Alive made me think about animals and their brief, dim lives in a completely new way.'—Laura Hackett, The Times (UK)

“Captivating . . . A work of quiet and yet spirited exhilaration.” —Edward P. Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World

'An uncommonly commanding debut.'—Kirkus Reviews

A polyphonic debut following an aging French bulldog and the parasitic worms that send her toward death — a singular, sly novel about form, freedom, interiors, and the matter by which we are composed and consumed.

Gelsomina is a French Bulldog who leads a routine life in a glass house. One day, she ingests an orb of parasitic worms who make an imperfect home inside her. Approaching death, yet filled with new life, she begins to see everything differently: her attachment to the designer-architect couple with whom she lives; the naive preoccupations of their younger French Bulldog, Zampanò; her feelings for an elusive fox; and the voids within and beyond her. The worms propel Gelsomina to plumb the meaning of her domestic existence and ask if her rebirth lies in the wild unknown outside the panes.

The Oldest Bitch Alive is a polyphonic story of containment refracting across scales. Revolving perspectives meditate on consciousness, theories of everything, multispecies narratives, philosophies of form and the immaterial, and other ways in which matter is composed and consumed. Gelsomina’s introspections culminate in an ecstatic sprint through a natural world she’s never seen, awakening the French Bulldog to the depths of love, reverence, death, and the bound self in dichromatic color.