Wild Life

by Amanda Leduc

This book starts with humorous stories about hyenas in duster coats and quietly shifts into a philosophical, yet still funny, examination of the wildness that lives in humans. Rather than settling on a single allegory, Leduc assembles a series of chapters that read like linked short stories and come together into a beautiful piece of literary fiction. The characters, both animal and human, are complicated and porous: a neighbour begins sleeping outdoors and adopts the pack’s nocturnal habits, a pet learns to hunt small prey and so reshapes the household’s routines, an elder answers a child’s cry with a feral roar that both frightens and shields. At times these figures are tender—sharing food, curling against one another for warmth—and at other moments they turn violent, snatching at survival or lashing out when threatened, often showing cruelty and compassion in the same breath. As a committed animal-admirer and vegetarian, I love the way Leduc shifts her narrative away from a strictly human viewpoint, giving nonhuman lives and instincts equal value. The result is a brave, often funny, and frequently unsettling invitation to rethink our relationship with animals and to recognize potential wildness in our own lives.