Sabina Murray

A blistering new novel that follows a Filipino American journalist's return to dictatorship-ruled Manila  by a "cracklingly original" (Elle) and "singular" (New York Times Book Review) author, PEN Faulkner award-winner, Sabina Murray

"The Human Zoo unfolds like the best of stories - one compelling detail following the next until an entire world emerges, full of revelations and aching truths. Murray has given us a powerful page-turner full of wry humor and shattering wisdom about love, family, the meaning of home, and history. This novel pulses with that most difficult of urgent truths: running away only leads us back to ourselves but that might be exactly what saves us in the end."—MAAZA MENGISTE, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize

 " Domestic drama or international crisis, or both? For families, like Christina Klein's, it is always both. The Human Zoo begins with Klein's frank, gimlet-eyed assessments of her family and friends, in a Philippines controlled by a Duterte-like president, but what emerges effortlessly out of this is a spectacle of her family of aristocrats brought low by the populists they believe they control, and a vision of the Philippines but also of America, the two countries now more alike than ever before. One of the most interesting novels I've read in years, Murray is at the height of her powers, offering us a breathtaking, funny, terrifying oracle." —ALEXANDER CHEE, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

 "Narratively speaking, Sabina Murray is always up to something. In her new novel The Human Zoo, a harrowing tour of steamy, decadent Manila, she combines an unflinching gaze at moral complexity with humor so dark it will make you anxious about yourself for appreciating it. Murray may well be the most fearless and gloriously subversive novelist we have." —VALERIE MARTIN, author of Property