Ark Baby - Hardcover

Liz Jensen's second novel, Ark Baby, is a dark, randy, and riotous romp back to the future featuring twin plot lines as tightly twisted as a double helix. The novel (if not the story) kicks into gear on New Year's Eve 1999 when a sudden, heavy rainfall over Britain signals the end of fertility on the Emerald Isle; with the turn of the millennium, every last specimen of British womanhood is rendered mysteriously barren. In the aftermath of this event, child-starved couples start turning to lower primates to satisfy their baby lust; enter veterinarian Bobby Sullivan, the hapless hero of Jensen's quirky meditation on evolution and survival of the fittest. After accidentally killing a client's beloved macaque monkey and being charged with murder, Bobby escapes to a remote northern seaside town called Thunder Spit and eventually gets involved with two, slightly hirsute twins whom he manages to impregnate--the first fertile women in England since the millennium.

Not content to chronicle Bobby's adventures in Thunder Spit circa 2000-something, Jensen weaves in the 19th-century adventures of foundling Tobias Phelps as counterpoint. Discovered abandoned in the Thunder Spit church by a childless vicar and his wife, Tobias is raised by the couple as their own, but his unusual appearance (squashed features, odd feet, hairy body) spur him to find his biological parents. As Bobby muddles towards 21st-century parenthood and Tobias gets tangled up in Victorian England's fascination with the theories of Darwin, the two plots begin to converge in a welter of diary entries, exotic recipes, strange artifacts, and curious coincidences. By the end of Ark Baby readers might well conclude that far from being "red in tooth and claw," Nature has one hell of a sense of humor.

Liz Jensen is the author of Egg Dancing (long-listed for the Orange Prize), Ark Baby (shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and long-listed for the Orange Prize), The Paper Eater, War Crimes for the Home (long-listed for the Orange Prize), and The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, currently in development as a major motion picture by Anthony Minghella. She divides her time between Copenhagen and London.