The Fig Book

'For now, and for our purposes here, every man is Bob.'

The heroine of The Fig Book wakes on her first morning in the grand house with the feeling that she might finally be becoming a real person-or, at least, a woman. She's been instructed to enjoy the special view by the self-satisfied landscape artist, who has also entrusted the couple with the care of his dog. The view is remarkable. And the dog is learning surprising new talents. But all Bob wants to do is film them and put them on the internet. Feeling increasingly alienated, she goes back over the many Bobs she's known and been known by. All that sex and all that shame, it turns out, has a seething lasting power.

As she begins to shed the old human constraints, a spiral of unnerving events threatens to tear the whole natural and unnatural world apart.

The Fig Book is a cry of feral rage, a bull in the china shop of the male ego, a failed love story that cracks open into an exhilarating ecological parable. It is a story about relationships, rewilding, and the strange fire of the self that can't be disentangled from the living world. Audaciously original, Joan Fleming's debut draws us into an entirely unexpected moral universe.