Animal Lovers by Palk, Rob

Description

Author: Palk, RobModern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)Published on 19 October 2026 by Salt Publishing in the United Kingdom.Paperback | 272 pages, Not illustrated198 x 129 | 249g
The Bookseller 10 titles not to miss in OctoberStuart Block is thirty-three, partially sighted, recently married, and as the novel opens watching his wife of four months pack her bags. Marie isnt leaving him for another man, exactly. She is leaving him for the badgers. With the governments cull under way, she has found something she cares about more fiercely than she cares about Stuart, and nothing he says not appeals to love, nor to reason, nor to the particular uselessness of badgers as romantic rivals is going to change that.Left alone in a mildewing London flat with a resentful cat and a single surviving basil plant, Stuart embarks on a campaign to win Marie back. What he discovers, instead, is a cast of people he never expected to meet and a world he had never thought to enter.Told in Stuarts irresistibly companionable first-person voice, Animal Lovers is a novel about grief and gratitude, about illness and the aftermath of survival, about the ways we fail the people we need most and the ones we havent met yet. It is very funny, and, when it needs to be, quietly devastating.