New Animal

Amelia Aurelia is nearing thirty and works as a cosmetician at her family's funeral home, gently preparing the dead for viewing while keeping the living at arm's length. Her closest relationships run through dating apps; sex is something she is good at and intimacy is something she avoids. When her warm, steadying mother dies suddenly, the fragile order Amelia has built collapses and she flees the funeral, escaping to her birth father in Tasmania.

There she stumbles into a struggling local BDSM community, where her clumsy, often hilarious attempts to belong are met with confusion, patience and unexpected tenderness. What begins as another way to feel something through her body becomes, slowly, a reckoning with the grief she has refused to hold.

Ella Baxter's debut is a darkly comic, unsettling and tender portrait of a young woman learning that she cannot outrun her own feelings. It moves between the mortuary and the dungeon with the same deadpan honesty, using the body — its weight, its needs, its limits — as the route back to an emotional life Amelia has spent years holding shut.