Animals

Overview

Emma Jane Unsworth’s Animals is her second novel, first published in the United Kingdom by Canongate Books in 2014 and released in the United States the following year. Set in Manchester, it is a contemporary novel of female friendship, combining comic energy with an unsparing account of drinking, drugs, work and emotional dependence. The city is more than a backdrop: its bars, clubs and shared living spaces form the environment in which the characters’ habits and loyalties take shape.

The story follows Laura and Tyler, best friends for more than a decade who are now in their early thirties. They share a ramshackle Manchester flat and a life organized around alcohol, drugs and late-night parties. Laura works at a call centre while struggling to make progress as a writer. Tyler, an American with more money, helps finance their hedonistic routine. Their bond is affectionate and sustaining, but also deeply entangled: each can enable the other’s worst decisions as readily as she can offer comfort.

That arrangement comes under pressure when Laura’s relationship with Jim, a pianist who does not drink, develops into an engagement. His presence introduces the possibility of a more settled life, but it also forces Laura to consider what she wants and what her existing habits are costing her. For Tyler, Laura’s growing commitment threatens the shape of the friendship on which their shared life has depended. The resulting emotional triangle is therefore not simply a contest for romance. It tests whether a close friendship can survive when one person begins to change, and whether loyalty means preserving the old pattern or allowing the other person to leave it behind.

Themes and background

The novel’s central subject is the complicated intimacy between women: affection mixed with rivalry, mutual care mixed with codependence, and the painful possibility that two people may no longer want the same future. Unsworth does not present Laura and Tyler merely as cautionary figures. Their nights out contain real pleasure and companionship, even as the cycle of excess can become destructive. The comedy gives the story speed and bite, while its frankness keeps the consequences of that lifestyle in view.

The book also questions the social expectations placed on women as they reach their thirties. Unsworth has said that she wrote with the question of how society judges women who reject or delay convention, including marriage and children, in order to keep drinking and dancing. She is interested in “messy” women and in the links and loves between them. Written in 2012, Animals draws on Manchester as an essential part of its imagined world; Unsworth has described the city as intrinsic to the story. The novel’s concern is not simply whether its characters will become respectable adults, but who gets to define adulthood and whether change has to mean surrendering pleasure, friendship or independence.

Reception and standing

The book’s candid voice, irreverent comedy and attention to the costs of hedonism brought it significant notice. In 2015 it won the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. It remains one of Unsworth’s best-known novels and was adapted as a feature film, extending its reach beyond readers of the book. Its continuing appeal lies in refusing an easy moral: Laura and Tyler’s friendship can be both liberating and limiting, and growing up does not erase the grief involved in changing a life shared with someone else. By placing that dilemma at the centre of a lively, distinctly Mancunian story, Animals has secured a notable place in contemporary fiction about women’s friendship and unconventional adulthood.