Hello there! Today I’m here sharing an extract of We Are Animals by Tim Ewins which was published by Lightning Books in March of this year! This tour was organised by the brilliant Ellie, as part of The Squadpod festivities to celebrate such a brilliant book.
Available now to purchase, and with a snazzy little deal if you buy directly from the publisher (check it out!) I highly recommend you take a gander!
Before I share the extract, here’s the blurb:
A cow looks out to sea, dreaming of a life that involves grass.
Jan is also looking out to sea. He’s in Goa, dreaming of the passport-thief who stole his heart (and his passport) forty-six years ago. Back then, fate kept bringing them together, but lately it seems to have given up.
Jan has not. In his long search he has accidentally held a whole town at imaginary gunpoint in Soviet Russia, stalked the proprietors of an international illegal lamp-trafficking scam and done his very best to avoid any kind of work involving the packing of fish. Now he thinks if he just waits, if he just does nothing at all, maybe fate will find it easier to reunite them.
His story spans fifty-four years, ten countries, two imperfect criminals (and one rather perfect one), twenty-two different animals and an annoying teenager who just…
Will…
Not…
Leave.
But maybe an annoying teenager is exactly what Jan needs to help him find the missing thief?
Okay, next up, the extract, feast your eyes upon this!
You could be forgiven for thinking that vests can see in the dark. They’re regularly found at night and they’re often luminous. They congregate on small beaches in Thailand and India, or on large beaches in Australia for the high season. It’s on these beaches that they successfully, quickly and loudly find themselves. They find that the country they’re in is in actual fact their spiritual home, and they always seem to be holding a small plastic bucket of vodka and Red Bull.
The truth is that vests cannot see in the dark – not everything, anyway. They can only see other vests. They rarely see workers, restaurant owners, cleaners, the elderly or parts of the world without sand.
After dark, vests glow. This attracts other vests, and they discuss the ways in which the small particles of eroded rock beneath their feet have changed their outlook on life completely, and how they don’t know if they could live in a Western society again. They discuss the blogs they’ve written (which are normally about small plastic buckets of vodka and Red Bull) and then later they find that they’re both in the new spiritual home for two months, and that they’re going to share the same flight home. Then they discuss the ‘not even in the cinema yet’ film it turns out they’d both watched on the flight out.
Being a vest is only a temporary condition which is normally cured by the vest holding onto the material that’s loosely hanging by its side and pulling its hands upwards and over its head. Once this process has been followed, the vest begins to realise that there is no spiritual home, it has crabs living in its flip flops and that it is in desperate need of a shower.
Often, later in life, a vest will become something useful like a doctor, a builder or a teacher. No one will know about its two months of being a vest, and an ex-vest will tend to lie about it. Lots of ex-vests will revisit the spiritual home some years later with their children and there will be new vests scattered around the beach. Ex-vests don’t usually like new vests, and they tend to mumble about them under their breath. ‘Another poxy vest,’ they mumble.
Doesn’t it sound brilliant?!!
The Reading Closet 