Animal Sanctuary

Winner of the seventh Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction

A wild and mysterious novel of multiple characters and episodes structured around the life and career of a fictional actress and animal rights activist,Animal Sanctuaryis the winner of the seventh Starcherone Fiction Prize. The manuscript was selected by novelist and short story writer Stacey Levine.

Animal Sanctuaryis a challenging, readable, powerful, and mysterious novel. The story—not a single plot, but multiple, peripherally connected episodes and discourses—concerns an American actress, Kitty Dawson, who stars in two movies by a famous (and famously obscure) British director, Albert Wickwood, both having animal-disaster themes. Kitty then goes on to make a great many other pictures with animal themes, and to found in the 1970s a sanctuary for big cats that rich people decide first to have as pets, then abandon. Later, Kitty’s only son, Rory, raised in the animal sanctuary and as a young teen the lover of a renowned Austrian big cat trainer, becomes an installation and performance artist whose work incorporates animals and animal themes, as well as attempts to critique and get outside of institutions.

Other plotlines concern a would-be revolutionary who also serves as Kitty’s body double in a film in Africa, the career of a cinematographer whose specialization is “shooting” animals, and reflections on understanding the ethics of human-animal relationships. The book as a whole becomes a series of meditations on making one’s own meanings from within those structures others place us in—the effort of striving for freedom, the enclosures that keep us from attaining it, and yet the beauty and necessity of such efforts. Throughout, Falkner’s prose is smart, versatile, and frequently beautiful.