Bad Animals

Maeve Cosgrove is buttoned-up and, with her brilliant daughter now away at college, devoted to her job at a quiet public library in Maine. Then a teenager accuses her of spying on the girl's romantic escapades in the mezzanine bathroom. Maeve is laid off and humiliated, and she sets about trying to clear her name.

Around the same time, her favorite author, Harrison Riddles, finally answers her invitation to speak at the library. He announces that he plans to write a novel about another young library patron, a Sudanese refugee, and he asks Maeve to help persuade the young man to take part. A scheme to win back her job draws her deeper into Riddles's world, where hard questions about sex, morality, and the purpose of literature threaten to upend her orderly life.

This propulsive, sexy novel looks at the limits of empathy and the dangers of appropriation through the eyes of a disgraced small-town librarian. It is a sharp, page-turning caper about one woman's search for agency and her eventual reckoning with what kind of animal she is.