The lives of several ordinary people—among them a boozy American surgeon, a former asylum patient, and a zoo veterinarian with a fondness for tigers—collide in unexpected ways in this historical novel set against the backdrop of the Franco-Prussian War. When the Prussians lay siege to Paris, several of the beasts escape from the zoo and run amuck; two men indulge in a forbidden romance; and a young woman does the unthinkable to protect herself. As the war reaches its inglorious denouement, revolutionaries establish a commune and the French government shells its own citizens. The climactic set piece, the burning of Paris, evokes comparisons with Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Stef Penney grasps the enigmatic nature of animals, and delights in keeping the reader off-balance in the closing pages by piling on calamities and surprises. A humane and original epic, dazzling in its uniqueness.