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Our Familiars

The meaning of animals in our lives
by
October 2025, no. 480

Our Familiars: The meaning of animals in our lives by Anne Coombs

Upswell Publishing, $29.99 pb, 226 pp

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Our Familiars

The meaning of animals in our lives
by
October 2025, no. 480

The unbelievable lacework of it all – the patterns and linkages, the flickerings of knowledge and mystery, the astonishing shapes – is what Anne Coombs’s Our Familiars: The meaning of animals in our lives explores. This is a family book; specifically, a multi-species family book. Intimacies made between bodies is the soil in which the work is grown. And it comes from a writer who spent a lifetime thinking about, writing for, and working towards companionship, co-operation, and the safety of others. It is a posthumous publication too; a work fed and raised by Coombs, but finished, edited, and carried into the world by Susan Varga, Anne’s partner of thirty-three years, and close friend Joyce Morgan. Coombs died in December 2021, not long after the Black Summer fires and the Covid-19 pandemic – a time when all our interdependencies were raging (as they continue to).

Our Familiars: The meaning of animals in our lives

Our Familiars: The meaning of animals in our lives

by Anne Coombs

Upswell Publishing, $29.99 pb, 226 pp

Buy this book

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

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