For one year, beginning at puberty, every adolescent ‘breaches’ during the full moon. On these nights, they run wild, destroying everything in their path...

As a well-behaved and over-achieving teenager, Lumen Fowler knows she is different. While the rest of her peers are falling beneath the sway of her community's darkest rite of passage, she resists, choosing to hole herself up in her room with only books for company.

For Lumen has a secret. Her mother never breached and she knows she won’t either. But as she investigates the town’s strange traditions and unearths stories from her family’s past, she soon realises she may not know herself – or her wild side – at all...

A gothic coming-of-age tale for modern times, When We Were Animals is a dark, provocative journey of self discovery