Tammy kept losing jobs-at the checkout counter, as a hospital cleaner, and now with the before-and-after-school program. But what worried her most was Sam, her youngest. From the time he was very young it had been clear that something was wrong with Sam, seriously wrong. And though they didn''t often speak of it, the whole family could certainly see it. "He''s pathetic," Sam''s sister Letitia would sneer to her friends, "pathetic." Tammy never felt that way herself, not for a moment. But what was she to do?-that was the question. Animals follows Sam on the extraordinary odyssey that begins with Tammy''s decision. Central to the narrative of his progress are the Stinson family-above all Naomi Stinson, a young girl who develops a special feeling for the strange creature, Sam. Animals is set in an indeterminate future in which virtually all the species that humans have for millennia used as food have become extinct; the world it creates is at once eerily foreign and disturbingly familiar. In the sharp-edged poignancy of the ethical questions it poses, in the strikingly innovative narrative techniques it employs, and above all, in the remarkable power of the story it tells, Animals is, quite simply, unique.