An unforgettably exuberant and potent novel by a writer at the height
of her powers
Two auditors for the U.S. egg industry go rogue and conceive a plot to
steal a million chickens in the middle of the night--an entire egg
farm's worth of animals. Janey and Cleveland--a spirited former runaway
and the officious head of audits--assemble a precarious, quarrelsome
team and descend on the farm on a dark spring evening. A series of
catastrophes ensues.
Deb Olin Unferth's wildly inventive novel is a heist story of a very
unusual sort. Swirling with a rich array of voices, Barn 8 takes
readers into the minds of these renegades: a farmer's daughter, a former
director of undercover investigations, hundreds of activists, a forest
ranger who suddenly comes upon forty thousand hens, and a security guard
who is left on an empty farm for years. There are glimpses twenty
thousand years into the future to see what chickens might evolve into on
our contaminated planet. We hear what hens think happens when they die.
In the end the cracked hearts of these indelible characters, their
earnest efforts to heal themselves, and their radical actions will lead
them to ruin or revelation.
Funny, whimsical, philosophical, and heartbreaking, Barn 8 ultimately
asks: What constitutes meaningful action in a world so in need of
change? Unferth comes at this question with striking ingenuity,
razor-sharp wit, and ferocious passion. Barn 8 is a rare
comic-political drama, a tour de force for our time.
