How to Be Human: A Novel - Hardcover

“Hypnotic... The narrative balance is wonderfully sly and assured throughout... If, as I do, one likes to dwell on the handsome presence of animals, and on the rustlings of various leaves, grasses and insects, this novel satisfies and delights. But even greater pleasure is to be had from the dark side of Mary's enchantments.”
―The New York Times Book Review

“A thrilling psychodrama... Cocozza 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.”
―The Economist

“Enchanting... For all its suggestiveness and sensuality, Cocozza’s narrative is artfully restrained . . . In this startling debut, Cocozza 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 (London)

“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.”
―The Guardian (London)

“A writer who is clearly unafraid of launching herself with a bang . . . Compelling . . . We are reminded of how close to the surface primal instincts can prowl.”
―The Telegraph (London)

“How to Be Human is a 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 Mantel, author of Wolf Hall

“Paula Cocozza’s brilliant debut is an incredible addition to her already impressive career as a features writer for the Guardian. In this beautiful book, Mary meets a fox, and what unfolds is possibly a love story, possibly a story of madness, possibly a story of vivid and beautiful imagination and a clever coping mechanism, and possibly all three at the same time.... A gorgeous tale with gripping prose.”
―Read It Forward