Barn 8

Description

One disaffectedadministrator, one disenchanted teenager, four hundred and twenty-one veganextremists, sixty trucks, and nine hundred thousand grumpy layer hens awaitingliberation. In barns. Six barns. No, wait, seven. No, wait …  Two auditors for the US egg industry conceive a plotto liberate an entire egg farm’s worth of animals, with catastrophic results.This wildly inventive but utterly plausible novel about a heist of a veryunusual kind swirls with a rich array of voices: a farmer’s daughter, hundredsof activists, a forest ranger who stumbles upon forty thousand hens, and asecurity guard abandoned for years on a farm. We glimpse the evolution ofchickens twenty thousand years from now. We hear what hens think happens whenthey die. And at the heart of this more-than-plucky novel liesthe question: what constitutes meaningful action in a world so in need ofchange? With towering ingenuity, eviscerating wit, and unflappable passion,Barn 8 is a true rare breed, a comic-political drama, and a tour de forcefor our time. ‘A novel like no other: An urgent moral fantasia, a post-human parable, a tender portrait of animal dignity and genius.’ Dana Spiotta ‘Deb Olin Unferth’s hilarious genius is on dazzling display in this novel. Come for the brilliant insights about our faltering civilisation. Stay for the revolutionaries and the chickens.’ Jenny Offill