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Why do humans seek meaning to life? How do our imaginations leap into worlds so far beyond our actual reality? This book explores how we decorate our existence with countless fictions, twisting and turning to avoid acknowledging that we too are animals.

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The powerful, beautiful and chilling sequel to the bestselling Straw Dogs

´By nature volatile and discordant, the human animal looks to silence for relief from being itself while other creatures enjoy silence as their birthright´

Why do humans seek meaning to life? How do our imaginations leap into worlds so far beyond our actual reality? In this chilling and beautiful sequel to Straw Dogs, John Gray explores how we decorate our existence with countless fictions, twisting and turning to avoid acknowledging that we too are animals. Drawing on an extraordinary array of writers who are mesmerized by extremity, from Ballard to Conrad, Gray makes us re-imagine our place in the world.

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The Silence of Animals is a new kind of book from Gray, a sort of poetic reverie on the human state, on the state, that is, of the human animal ... He blends lyricism with wisdom, humour with admonition, nay-saying with affirmation, making in the process a marvellous statement of what it is to be both an animal and a human in the strange, terrifying and exquisite world into which we straw dogs find ourselves thrown John Banville Guardian

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Gray, John
John Gray´s major books include Straw Dogs, Black Mass and The Silence of Animals. A second edition of his essays, Gray´s Anatomy, was published in 2016. He now principally writes for the New Statesman.

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