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A feminist utopia crumbles with one impossible birth.
On an isolated mountaintop, a small feminist community is fracturing under the weight of ideological divides and dwindling numbers. Mila struggles to hold the women together, while deeper in the bush her aunt Frank—an ailing recluse—lives with only her dog, Chicken Midnight, for company. Nearby, an orchid endling approaches its own death, and the extinction of its entire species.
As Frank grows increasingly unwell and secretive about her condition, the community women begin mysteriously falling pregnant. When Mila gives birth to the only boy, their hardline separatist ideals face an impossible test.
Vividly expressed, wildly funny, and wholly original, The Endling examines the volatile intersection of community and politics, exploring what happens when the borders we construct between species, between sexes, between self and world prove more porous than we imagine.
“Keely Jobe’s The Endling is an exquisite debut. A novel that goes right to the heart of urgent environmental, gender, and multispecies conversations and practices, and then probes further — it blooms! I am blown away by the majesty of Jobe’s world — managing voices across species, with an intimacy that speaks to everyone. This is the novel we need to be reading right now.”
—Laura Jean McKay, author of The Animals in That Country
“The Endling is a transformative novel, a real one of a kind. Equal parts tender and feral. An impure delight.”
—Jennifer Mills, author of Salvage
“To read The Endling is to engage in a physical act. Of course, this is always true of reading. But the way in which Keely Jobe weaves the rhythms of the bush with the bodily and intellectual processes of her human and nonhuman characters creates a prose that, much like the tangle orchid that snares the character Frank, reaches beyond the page and gathers the reader into its steamy, slippery, and prickly world. This novel is alive in a way that is striking and original.”
—Erin Hortle, author of The Octopus and I
Contents
Spring 1991
Frank
Duck
Mila
Want
Spring 1992
Snake
Mangoes
The Orchid
The Company of Strangers
Incisor
Spring 1993
The MothersSpring 1994
FinchSmoke Gets in Your Eyes
Contamination
January 1995
The Orchid Dreams, the OrchidsFour Walls
Vermiculite
Eagle
Ash
February 1995
QuenchThe Orchid