Enter the Aardvark

In this “blisteringly innovative and outrageous” (The Observer) novel that the Los Angeles Times describes as "somewhere between Nabokov's Pnin and Veep,” a young politician discovers a mysterious stuffed aardvark on his doorstep and sets out on a journey to find out what it means.

Early one August morning, millennial congressman Alexander Paine Wilson (R) receives a strange package in the mail. Inside is an enormous taxidermied aardvark. What does it mean? Well, everything. Hurtling from the beginning of the universe to present-day Washington, DC, this astonishing, edge-of-your-seat novel is at once a piercing look into the sick heart of our democracy and a profoundly moving meditation on the nature of love, power, and evil. In the end you will not only know the meaning of the aardvark, you will see our current reality through new eyes.

*One of Time Magazine's Must-Read Books of 2020*

Jessica Anthony has been a butcher in Alaska, an unlicensed masseuse in Poland, and a secretary in San Francisco. In 2017, while writing Enter the Aardvark, Anthony was working as "Bridge Guard," guarding the Maria Valeria Bridge between Sturovo, Slovakia and Esztergom, Hungary. Normally, she lives in Maine and teaches at Bates College.