This was a dark, unrelentingly-depressing dystopian novel about a near-future world of severe drought and the struggle to survive. It felt alarmingly real and possible.

Thirsty Animals
Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thriller
Rachelle Atalla
⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

This was a hard read. Not just because of the writing style and the slow pacing but also because of the various themes in this book. Some of the topics were difficult to read, and I don't usually struggle with them but the way they were written and how they would come up out of nowhere made them uncomfortable for me. I'll list these themes and topics at the bottom of this review.

Rachelle Atalla doesn't use speech marks in her books and I have to admit that it makes things confusing for me. I found myself backtracking often to try and make sense of who is talking because theres no clear indication.

Although there's lots of details about Aida's life, day to day, it takes some time for anything to happen and when it does, it can be over developed and sometimes drawn out.

I didn't feel like I could connect to some of the characters but most of them were good.

The plot premise itself was very interesting and actually seemed like something that could become reality.

It's a shame that this book didn't live up to my expectations because it really does have a lot of potential.

TWs: Kidnap, murder, human trafficking, the sale of children, abortion, culling animals/killing pets.

*Thank you to @netgalley, Hodder & Stoughton and Rachelle Atalla for providing this ARC. This is my own opinion and an honest review*

A tense thriller set in both a pre- and post-apocalyptic world as severe drought drains the world of its water. I thought this was stronger than THE PHARMACIST due to a stronger sense of place (rooted in Atalla’s native Scotland) and the fact that the central conflict is more believable and plausible. The pacing lagged a bit towards the end and it made getting to the final twist a bit slow, but I overall enjoyed it.

I was lucky to get to read Thirsty Animals before its release in March! It follows a family stranded at their farm during an extreme drought in Scotland. I was incredibly stressed throughout but couldn’t stop reading. If you also like a sense of foreboding and anxiety with your fiction, I highly recommend!

An immersive dystopian novel with a unique and captivating premise that is as thought-provoking as it is compelling. Although it is set in the future, it is very much a book for our own time, and it will appeal to many readers.

Thirsty Animals is a gripping exploration of the threats of climate change and, at the same time, a tense and emotional tale of survival. And although it is a different storyline to Atalla’s debut The Pharmacist, it still retains the author’s strong voice, magnificent characterisations, and a dystopian setting. It also seems a much more commercial novel than her debut as the world feels far more familiar here.

Atalla is brilliant at giving life to her characters. They feel so real and relatable. She achieves this mostly by ensuring her characters are flawed and compassionately drawn, which makes us care deeply about what happens to them. For example, Aida is very likable despite some of the choices she makes. But her moral concerns about those decisions are what makes the reader identify with her and the strength of the prose makes us wonder what we would do in her circumstances.

Aida is a fabulous female protagonist, and readers will want her to be happy and safe. While the relationship between Aida and her Uncle Bobbie is endearing and heart breaking. The scenes on the farm gave us a fascinating insight into the respect and love a farmer has for their animals but some scenes might upset some readers.

There is a real sense of unease and tension within the narrative caused by the shortage of water and the arrival of some strangers at the farm. It almost feels like a psychological thriller and a sense of desperation and foreboding escalates within the prose to draw the reader deeper into the tale. And because the premise feels as if it could be real in the not so distant future, we can’t help but imagine it happening to us.

Thirsty Animals has a glorious sense of atmosphere and is deeply attuned to the natural world - there is a constant reminder of the dangers of climate change making it very topical and relatable for contemporary readers. The threads on immigration and migration are sensitively written and pose a moral question for the reader. The author has clearly done a lot of research to ensure the authenticity of the storyline which is evident in the details within the book and there are many comparisons to be drawn with the world we live in now.

Combined with an intricately planned high stakes plot - it truly is a haunting and riveting read.

I read an eARC of this book so thank you to Net Galley, the author and the publisher for allowing this.

I wanted to read this book because I read The Pharmacist by this author and I really enjoyed it. Thirsty Animals is set in Scotland when extreme drought has caused people to flee England to Scotland to try to find water. There’s very little water in Scotland but our main character lives on a farm where they are still managing to just about get by. Things steadily decline.

I can’t say too much about plot without revealing massive spoilers which is a shame because I really want to talk about it! I read this book in one sitting which just shows how engaging it was. I was gripped. It was a really tense, really disturbing book. I was utterly enraged at times by the behaviour of certain characters.

I’ve been reading more climate change fiction over the last couple of years and I think it’s important and this is a good addition to the genre. This book is quite scary because it doesn’t seem particularly far fetched. Very unsettling.

In both this book and The Pharmacist, the author has chosen not to use speech marks. I really don’t like this, I find it completely jarring. I was frequently having to stop to try and make sense of a sentence, work out who was saying what and what was/ wasn’t dialogue. This just kept throwing me out of a narrative that I was engaged in and I found it really distracting.

This book would have been a solid 4 star for the quality of the narrative and writing, but the way I had to keep stopping because of the lack of speech marks makes it closer to a 3.5. This is a great author and it’s frustrating being taken out of her exciting and tense writing to try and make sense of what you’re reading.

I would recommend this to people who enjoy dystopian novels or cli-fi.

Thirsty Animals provides us with a dystopian view of the future that feels very current, and worryingly not that futuristic at all. It feels so real, so possible, which made it easy to sink into this story.

Like the author's previous book, The Pharmacist, the story focuses on the people and their everyday lives amidst the horror and the unknown. We only know what they know, and this sense of unease and constant underlying threat slowly builds up in such a powerful way. I found myself getting suspicious and falling into 'in group / out group' thinking so easily.

An atmospheric and thought-provoking tale of survival, perseverance and family. Recommended to all who enjoy realistic dystopian stories.

I love a dystopian novel but I did find this a bit pedestrian in places with too much detail about things that didn't really matter to the plot. An interesting premise but I found myself not believing in the way it played out.

Another masterpiece from Atalla.

I thought THE PHARMACIST was brilliant so I was very much looking forward to reading THISTY ANIMALS.

Another dystopian view of the future, that isn't all that 'out there', makes for terrifying reading. A world running out of water. Atalla writes nuanced characters with depth and skill. The fear is a constant threat written in the background of a story about Aida and her family living on the Scottish Boarders. When the threat becomes all too real, Atalla shows how society can break down around us.

Brilliant.

I challenge anyone not to cry while reading this book!

I loved everything about this heart-wrenching, terrifying novel. The fear experienced by characters was so real to me that it actually made me thirsty whenever I read it, just to imagine how frightening a severe global drought would be. This isn't just a clichéd story about the resilience of human nature, it shows how quickly civilised society can unravel and how selfish and cruel people can be when put under extreme pressure.

Without a doubt, this is a book that will stick with me for a while...

A dystopian novel about survival and family.
Aida lives with her mother and uncle in a farm in Scotland, water is scarce and life is difficult.
A family arrive with a pregnant daughter and they are given shelter on the farm.
A frightening story of a possible future due to global warming.
Thank you to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for my e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

Another triumph from Rachelle Atalla! In another novel of claustrophobic, captivating world-building, Atalla explores a near future Scotland - now an independent country - where water is scarce and expensive (a bottle of spring water costs around £15), but outside the border, conditions are worse. Aida lives on a farm and works in a service station, trying to get by with her cold mother, and her lovely Great-Uncle Bobby and his partner Sam. Tension is high, the atmosphere bleak and uncomfortable, but there is always a sense that survival is possible. Atalla again creates a believable, vivid picture of life not too far away.

Another excellent dystopian read from Rachelle Atalla! I enjoyed THE PHARMACIST so I was excited to see what a world without water could look like. A page-turning, claustrophobic read, Atalla is the master of tapping into your wildest fears and putting them on the page in a way that is uncomfortable, compelling and just a little too close to home. While I found some of the animal death scenes difficult to read (that’s just my issue), this was well-written and thoughtful. There were also several twists I did not see coming. I’d highly recommend!

Rachelle Atalla gives us another dystopian view of the future this time with a world running out of water. Aida is forced back home to live on the family farm with her mother Miriam and Uncle Bobby. She works in a service station six miles from the English border where things on that side are so bad there’s attempted mass migration to Scotland which is curbed by stringent restrictions. Supplies in the service station dwindle daily with drinks such as bottled water costing an arm and a leg. There’s been no rain for over a year and the previous five have been unbelievably hot leading to severe drought conditions, nothing can grow and so there’s nothing to feed the animals. One day, strangers arrive at the farm seeking help with Miriam being especially suspicious of them. Are her concerns valid? Can things actually get any worse?

The premise of the novel is good as it presents a view of the world that is sadly all too possible to accept given the heat of our previous summer but it’s inevitably dark, bleak and depressing at times. However, despite this I get pulled deeper and deeper into the storytelling as I really begin to care about Aida and her family. The water situation is the raison d’être for all the reactions and dynamics that arise which causes understandable fear and suspicion of strangers. There’s plenty of tension and characters anxiety pulses off the pages. The danger of the situations both within and without the farm escalate with some things being beyond their control and so their helplessness and powerlessness is palpable with shocking, sinister overtones. In places I find it heartbreaking and sad particularly the inevitable consequences for the farm of the lack of water. The plot builds and you get some revelations you don’t see coming that really jolt you. The ending is dramatic but feels right.

This is a very thought provoking read, it’s inevitably not an easy one but the dynamics the author creates are fascinating especially between Aida and Miriam who are both very complex characters and not immediately likeable. It is extremely well written and I do get used to the lack of punctuation for dialogue!

With thanks to NetGalley and especially to Hodder and Stoughton for the much appreciated arc in return for an honest review.

a new view of our dystopian future, where water is running low and then running out.
The desperation pours off the page as Aida and her family struggle to preserve their precious and dwindling fresh water supply in the face of some strangers, on the road North who need their help even as they all look to the skies, praying for rain.
The book really made me think about aspects of our lives we take for granted, never imagining this could happen in our small corner of the globe and how we should all be doing more and using less.
incredible book!

'Thirsty Animals' is a largely uncompromising story that I don't think I'll soon forget.

The date is never specified, although references to things like Twitter and an absence of any new technology suggest it's the here and now. I would've shifted the timeline to 2040 or so, personally. Still, that gripe aside, what gripped me about this novel is the feeling that the characters are frogs in a steadily heating pot of water; that unnerving sense of things inexorably unravelling, of trying to pretend things are normal until this becomes impossible.

Aida, the narrator, is a curious person. She has that passiveness that I've experienced with the narrators of Sally Rooney's books. She and her mother also - and this is an annoyance that had me leaning towards giving the book 3 instead of 4 stars - make some bizarre decisions in listening to Evelyn further into the story. I still can't make sense of it. It's the sort of thing that only People in Literary Novels do. And, to get my final criticism out of the way, the ending felt too neat. Horrors like the scene at the border camp felt brushed under the carpet (there's another bit of implausibility - I'm sure eventually things are going to get that bad, but I suspect it'll be a few years into civic/governmental collapse before 5-year-olds are being executed...?)

So, yes, I do have some issues with the novel. But the good stuff outweighs the bad stuff ultimately. We need novels like this.

(With thanks to Hodder & Stoughton and NetGalley for this ebook in exchange for an honest review)

This book was disturbing as it felt like it could really happen with the climate crisis. Great characters and the relationships were beautiful. Highly recommended.

This was a teriifying read mainly because it isn't without the realms of possibility that this could happen in the world today. I liked the writing, style it flowed seamlessly, the stroy gripped me and the characters were well developed. A really enjooable read