"Animal" by Eleanor Stride

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FROM ANIMAL'S PEOPLE

REVIEWS IN BRIEF
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From the arresting opening line of Indra Sinha's vivid second novel ("I used to be human once"), the voice of Animal, the narrator, leaps out to grab you by the throat. Bawdy, irreverent and smart… Animal's People - part coming-of-age Bildungsroman, part vicious critique of corporate terrorism - is a bold and punchy tale.
New Statesman

Every now and then you come across a novel so honest that it leaves you gasping for breath - like a blow to the solar plexus. The emotion is raw, the story honest and the language simply that of the people. You know that once you start reading it will break your heart and yet you keep turning the pages because the story has to be told.
Indian Express

At its best, Sinha's writing is a blade gleaming in the moonlight. And the novel, for all its pain, is a work of profound humanity.
The Guardian

It is language that is the real hero of this Man Booker-shortlisted novel. The polyglot Animal communicates in an exhilarating torrent of words, a ridddling rush of English, French, Hindi, poems, puns, scatologically infected taunts and curses. His own uncanny ability to hear the thoughts of all creatures gives speech to insects, unborn foetuses and the dead. The effect is glorious. If the status of our humanity depends on our ability to communicate, then Animal's tongue belies the name he bears. At once playful, pitiless and moving, Animal's People stands as a testament to the courage and resilience of India's poor.
Times Literary Supplement

Erotic misery and fear drove Anne Enright's divided Dublin clan in the family drama that pipped McEwan to the Man Booker: The Gathering (Cape, £12.99). Discomfiting comedy and nimble, flab-free prose render her book far more of a dark delight than its bleak reputation would allow. But another Man Booker-shortlisted novel trumped even Enright in the art of plucking literary pleasure out of human pain. Indra Sinha's astonishing Animal's People (Simon & Schuster, £11.99) gave the Bhopal gas disaster of 1984 the artistic monument it has long deserved through the salty, scabrous monologue of the survivor-hero "Animal".

Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

Eleanor Stride is currently at the New York Studio School having spent seven years studying sculpture at the universities of Bologna and Athens. My interview with this exciting and powerful young sculptor will follow soon.