Animal Heart : A Novel

By Brenda Peterson

"An intriguing eco-novel based on recent research that sets a love story between scientists amid the aftermath of a mysterious beaching of whales and dolphins on the Oregon Coast." -- Seattle Post-Intelligencer

List Price: $24.95 Price: $16.97

Product Details

• Hardcover: 292 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.97 x 9.20 x 6.40
• Publisher: Sierra Club Books; (March 1, 2004)
• ISBN: 1578051088

Book Description

When an eerie mass stranding of whales and dolphins takes place along the mist-shrouded Oregon coast, forensic wildlife pathologist Isabel Spinner and her friend and coworker Marian Windhorse Gray covertly investigate this disaster as a crime against wildlife. For years, Isabel has kept plenty of emotional distance between herself and other humans while devoting herself to easing the suffering of animals. But when Isabel meets Marshall McGreggor, an undersea photographer whose recent transplant has him delving into the mystery surrounding his new heart, the two find themselves making surprising decisions that will forever change their lives.

In this, her fourth, novel, renowned author Brenda Peterson offers a captivating love story of people whose compassion for animals compels them into extraordinary acts of heroism. Based on cutting-edge science, this powerful page-turner tackles such timely and troubling issues as low-frequency active sonar and animal experimentation and forewarns of a future of Dead Zone oceans, disappearing species, and a world with creatures whose DNA boundaries have been genetically blurred. At once prescient and poignant, Animal Heart is a haunting, highly original story of the deep bonds between humans and animals--and of our inevitably linked fates.

About the Author

Brenda Peterson is an acclaimed novelist and nature writer whose last novel, Duck and Cover, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her nonfiction works include Nature and Other Mothers, Sister Stories, Living by Water, and a memoir, Build Me an Ark: A Life with Animals. She is coauthor, with Linda Hogan, of Sightings: The Gray Whales' Mysterious Journey and a coeditor of the celebrated anthology Intimate Nature: The Bond between Women and Animals. Most recently, she coedited, with Toni Frohoff, the anthology Between Species: Celebrating the Dolphin-Human Bond. Peterson lives in Seattle.