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An astonishing debut story collection about the interconnection between humans and animals navigating love, loss, and healing
Creatures swim, slither, and soar their way through this stunning short story collection about the inextricable nature of humans and animals that celebrates and bears witness to our fellow creatures and to the complex emotional terrain of our own lives.
A woman's personal trauma and anxiety are intertwined with the lives of the feral dogs abandoned in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. As a lesbian love affair unravels, the secrets of a gift-giving crow are revealed. The life of a veterinarian is told through the animals that she has loved and that she has tried to save. A dying man dreams of returning as a vulture after death. The plight of sea turtles on the brink of extinction weaves through a mother's devastation over the loss of a daughter.
Beautiful in its renderings of human experience, The Life of a Creature is a tender and haunting book imbued with the deeply sensory intimacies of the animal world.
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"The Life of a Creature is a beautiful and complex book. The stories weave through the emotional terrain of death and love and of the roles that animals play in our lives, their intertwined relationship to us. I don't think I've ever read a book quite like this one. It's different in the best way—the passion of a singular voice and vision."
—Deb Olin Unferth, author of Barn 8
"In Nadja Lubiw-Hazard's haunting stories, humans and nonhumans alike are held captive—by zoos, by family, by grief. Amid the rituals of life and death, the characters in these stories reflect and comfort one another: damaged humans seek solace in the natural world, and animals, both alive and dreamed, provide healing in unexpected and beautiful ways. With Lubiw-Hazard's vibrant language and attention to detail, The Life of a Creature is a powerful book embracing the complexities of life in both human and nonhuman realms."
—Midge Raymond, author of Floreana and My Last Continent
"A poetic rendering of humans and the animals they encounter, these stories hum with the intimacies of life and death, love and grief, desire, and loss. The Life of a Creature is a rich and evocative work that speaks to what it is to be alive."
—Pamela Mulloy, author of As Little as Nothing
"Nadja Lubiw-Hazard writes with a wide-open heart and mind. Every story in this collection is an arrival—bloodied, exquisite, and fierce. Brava."
—Alissa York, author of Far Cry
"[M]oving, tender, compelling, [these short stories] caught me off guard by how brutal they were at times, that I couldn't put them down ... [The Life of a Creature] is a book to be read aloud. It is poetry as much as it is prose, with precise and visceral language and imagery, words chosen not just for their meaning but also for how they sound, embodied language that appeals to all the senses, and characters I care for."
—The tƐmz Review
"The Life of a Creature is a haunting and disturbing book rooted in a luminous understory ... [D]espite all the darkness the overall effect is a shimmering reminder of the beauty and the sacredness of all life on earth. In these times when our world seems bent on self-destruction, The Life of a Creature is a collection of stories the sum of which makes you want to be, dare I say it, defiant? Yes!"
—Plenitude Magazine
Nadja Lubiw-Hazard (she/her) is a Toronto-based writer and veterinarian. She is the author of the novel The Nap-Away Motel (Palimpsest Press) and two children's books. As a manuscript, The Life of a Creature won the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature.