Invisible Beasts

**International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Longlist**

**Orion Book Award Finalist**

***O, The Oprah Magazine* “Title to Pick Up Now”**

“An amazing feat of imagination.” -* **Publishers Weekly** *** (starred review)**

“*Invisible Beasts* is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It’s wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.” -**ANTHONY DOERR**, author of *All the Light We Cannot See* and *The Shell Collector*

Sophie is an amateur naturalist with a rare genetic gift: the ability to see a marvelous kingdom of invisible, sentient creatures that share a vital relationship with humankind. To record her observations, Sophie creates a personal bestiary and, as she relates the strange abilities of these endangered beings, her tales become extraordinary meditations on love, sex, evolution, extinction, truth, and self-knowledge.

In the tradition of E.O. Wilson’s *Anthill, Invisible Beasts* is inspiring, philosophical, and richly detailed fiction grounded by scientific fact and a profound insight into nature. The fantastic creations within its pages-an ancient animal that uses natural cold fusion for energy, a species of vampire bat that can hear when their human host is lying, a continent-sized sponge living under the ice of Antarctica-illuminate the role that all living creatures play in the environment and remind us of what we stand to lose if we fail to recognize our entwined destinies.

**Sharona Muir** is the author of *The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father’s Lives.* The recipient of a Hodder Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, her writing has appeared in *Granta, Orion* magazine, *Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review,* and elsewhere. She is a Professor of Creative Writing and English at Bowling Green State University. *Invisible Beasts* is her first novel.