Stacey and Isak long for another child and decide to sign up for an experimental genetics program that offers them a chance to add to their family while supporting them in raising their desired child. Stacey knows that while the child will be hers and her husband’s, some cells from other life forms will be blended to produce a new kind of human. With the arrival of their special child Asta, Stacey and Isak find their own lives, and those of their other two children, turned inside out and upside down. Fauna is a scary, provocative and beautiful novel that asks big questions about responsibility, humanity, science and motherhood, set in an easily recognisable near-future Western Australia. Donna Mazza’s clear-eyed and lyrical intelligence endows this story with power, fear and a sense of reckoning. If this is one of several possible futures we are all travelling towards, this novel compels us to pay attention, suspend judgement, and accept that the answers we seek can only make sense if we ask the right questions.