The Believer

A novelist with cerebral palsy, Amanda Leduc is preoccupied with how fabulist forms of storytelling can influence society’s perception of disability. “As a disabled person in the world, I didn’t feel like I could fit anywhere,” she told the Weird Era podcast in April. “What I try to do in all of my work is gently interrogate structures of the stories that we tell.” A plot-defying narrative that explores the boundaries between human and animal, her latest, Wild Life, asks, What does it mean to be whole?

The tale begins in early twentieth-century Scotland. Josiah, a neurotic, bespectacled young man who can communicate with animals, is forced to leave town with a Christian missionary expedition headed for Siberia. He’s sent by his skeptical father, who blames him for his mother’s death in a barn fire twenty years earlier. “May God show you beautiful things,” Papa calls to his son as he departs. “May He make a work of your new life.”

On the...