How to Be Human

[A] poignant and playful meditation on loss, love and loneliness. How To Be Human vibrates with originality, poetry and guts and I loved every strange, yet beautiful, page – Ali Land, author of Good Me Bad MeHow to Be Human is an intriguing and subversive debut, an eerie tale that acts on the reader like a ghost story, charged with the power of the ignored and the suppressed. If we disdain our animal selves, they trail us, shadowing us at dawn and dusk. Paula Cocozza shows us that the line between the wilderness and the city is thin, easily transgressed; the ghost breathing in the thicket is our own wild nature. – Hilary MantelThere is much of [Ali] Smith’s playfulness in Paula Cocozza’s enchanting debut … For all its suggestiveness and sensuality, [her] narrative is artfully restrained … In this startling debut, [she] seems to be saying that, no matter how lonely the city becomes, through an open window a mass of life is listening back. * Times Literary Supplement *[An] impressive debut * Irish Times, International Fiction Book of the Year *Cocozza has a wonderful eye for detail, and her descriptions of the natural world are uncanny … She takes a big risk in narrating some sections from the point of view of the fox, and pulls it off with aplomb. * Guardian *Unsettling, the writing often vivid and rich. * Observer *Hypnotic … suspenseful … wonderfully sly and assured … Readers may come to realize they are on thrillingly unstable ground. * New York Times Book Review *Intriguing and unsettling … the tricky, shifting substance of relationships is so insightfully drawn and constantly surprises. – Laura Barnett, author of THE VERSIONS OF USA thrilling psychodrama … She brilliantly captures a sense of Hitchcockian, curtain-twitching intensity … Like the scent of a fox, truth and fact in How to Be Human start to evaporate. What is left behind is a pervasive sense that beneath the veneer of civility, something wilder is always lurking. * Economist *Sharp, thoughtful … exhilarating … the plot slips from urban pastoral to tense thriller. * Newsweek *

Paula Cocozza is a feature writer at the Guardian and completed her MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where she was the 2013⁄14 recipient of the David Higham Award. She lives in London and this is her first novel.

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