Animal Instinct
Coming March 2025 from GP Putnam's Sons ~ Preorder today!
Fleishman Is in Trouble meets Big Swiss in this darkly humorous and tantalizing pandemic-era portrait of sex, divorce, and midlife, about a Brooklynite who frankensteins the perfect lover.
It’s spring of 2020 and Rachel Bloomstein—mother of three, recent divorcée, and Brooklynite—is stuck inside. But her newly awakened sexual desire and lust for a new life refuse to be contained. Leaning on her best friend Lulu to show her the ropes, Rachel dips a toe in the online dating world, leading to park dates with younger men, flirtations with beautiful women, and actual, in-person sex. None of them, individually, are perfect . . . hence her rotation.
But what if one person could perfectly cater to all her emotional needs?
Driven by this possibility, Rachel creates Frankie, the AI chatbot she programs with all the good parts of dating in middle age . . . and some of the bad. But as Rachel plays with her fantasy to her heart’s content, she begins to realize she can’t reprogram her ex-husband, her children, her friends, or the roster of paramours that’s grown unwieldy. Perhaps real life has more in store for Rachel than she could ever program for herself.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR ANIMAL INSTINCT
“Animal Instinct is almost mysteriously kind and hot and funny—like Grace Paley crossed with Miranda July, crossed with, like, Tina Fey. I loved it so much. A joyful pandemic sex novel that’s also a scathing critique of marriage? It’s the book I didn’t know I needed.” —Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of Sandwich
“A juicy novel exploring what it means to start again at midlife, Animal Instinct is a refreshingly funny, devastatingly horny, and very human look at feminine desire and self-determination. A delicious read that’s like the greatest gab session with your best friend.” —Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
“Shearn’s Animal Instinct is the whole wild ride: honest, smart, deep, and so very funny! I loved it.” —Sierra Greer, author of Annie Bot
“Incisive, hot, and heartbreaking, this sizzling novel is as much about the emotional and physical acrobatics women go through to survive straight marriages as it is a siren call for women of all persuasions to forge lives on their own terms. Animal Instinct is the manifesto for self-love and liberation that we need this year.” —Courtney Maum, author of I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You and The Year of the Horses
“Animal Instinct is sexy, bitingly funny, and wise. Although it’s set in the very specific, perfectly rendered world of Brooklyn during the pandemic, Shearn’s compulsively readable exploration of what it means to start over will resonate with women everywhere.” —Rowan Beaird, author of The Divorcées
“Animal Instinct is a laugh-out-loud funny, clear-eyed appraisal of desire reawakened after divorce, as well as a tender, unflinching look at a modern marriage, what’s expected of women, and what we expect of ourselves—and what it means to let go of all that.” —Kirsten Bakis, author of King Nyx
Animal Instinct was featured in this AP News article on AI in contemporary fiction!