A woman’s story of movement as a both a lifestyle and a rite of passage, The Animal Days follows Julia’s journey of love and rock-climbing across three continents. In this fast-paced novel, joy is linked to self-destruction, love is inseparable from death, freedom is twinned with unbearable solitude, and life is worth only as much as a given moment. The taste for risk and vertigo never stop: they feed each other as the abyss approaches. Julia, determined to never look back, lives perpetually on the brink, even if it means shedding her own skin in the process.
I had never read a novel like The Animal Days. It’s like being naked at night in the forest, like loving your killer in the sacred wild, like eating your own thoughts for days and, then, climbing the bluff only to be abandoned. A woman (maybe you?) follows a trail to herself. to survive, she’ll make a path from bits of heart, flesh, death, memory... and think it’s love. But will it save her? Will it betray the beast she suspects lives inside her? Of course I loved this novel. Are you kidding me? How could I not?
— Anjanette Delgado, Author of The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho
This is the story of a woman searching for her own limits, a woman who initially appears to find fulfillment in pain and misfortune—but who ultimately achieves, in the course of her uprooting, an inner peace that may be either solid or very fragile (novels don’t tell us everything). Traveling half the world over, Keila Vall narrates an itinerary that is an adventure, a travel chronicle, and a metaphor for discovery: a journey through the essential things that have been deep inside us all along, but which we must spend a long time seeking before we can find, recognize, and accept them.
— Antonio Muñoz Molina, Príncipe de Asturias Prize, Jerusalem Prize
The Animal Days confirm Keila Vall de la Ville’s extraordinary abilities as a narrator. It’s a moving story about love, violence, freedom, and self–discovery. Only excellent literature can probe into these issues in a poetic and meaningful way, and affect the readers as in a rite of passage. The reader of Los días animales is one person at the beginning of the novel, and has become another towards the end.
— Alberto Barrera Tyzka, Tusquets Prize, Alfaguara Prize