Animal Instinct by Amy Shearn
An NPR Books We Love 2025One of Brooklyn Public Library's Books We Love 2025
The world has stopped. But Rachel is just getting started...
It's spring of 2020 and Rachel Bloomstein--mother of three, recent divorcée, and Brooklynite--is stuck inside. But her newly awakened sexual desire and lust for a new life refuse to be contained. Leaning on her best friend Lulu to show her the ropes, Rachel dips a toe in the online dating world, leading to park dates with younger men, flirtations with beautiful women, and actual, in-person sex. None of them, individually, are perfect . . . hence her rotation.
But what if one person could perfectly cater to all her emotional needs?
Driven by this possibility, Rachel creates Frankie, the AI chatbot she programs with all the good parts of dating in middle age . . . and some of the bad. But as Rachel plays with her fantasy to her heart's content, she begins to realize she can't reprogram her ex-husband, her children, her friends, or the roster of paramours that's grown unwieldy. Perhaps real life has more in store for Rachel than she could ever program for herself.
Amy Shearn is the author of the critically acclaimed novels How Far Is the Ocean from Here, chosen as a notable debut by Poets & Writers and a hot summer read by the Chicago Tribune, and The Mermaid of Brooklyn, which was a selection of Target's Emerging Authors program, a Hudson News Summer Reads pick, and was also published in the UK and as an audiobook. She is a fiction editor for Joyland Magazine, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Real Simple, and many literary publications. She earned an MFA from the University of Minnesota, has received a Promise Award grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and has participated in residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm and elsewhere. Amy lives in New York City with her two children.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780593718339 |
| ISBN 10 | 059371833X |
| Title | Animal Instinct |
| Author | Amy Shearn |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Penguin Putnam Inc |
| Year published | 2025-03-18 |
| Number of pages | 288 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |