Novels From a Non-Human Point of View: 13 to Read

TL;DR

• Non-human narrator novels run from Victorian animal stories to contemporary literary fantasy and science fiction.
• The best of them do not simply dress a person in fur. They build a way of seeing out of what the creature can smell, hear, fear, and want.
• Animal narrators are the oldest form. Insects, spiders, trees, and fungi are newer ground, and some of the most ambitious recent work lives there.
• These books are often read as fables, but many of them are really about power: who works, who is owned, and who makes the rules.
• Maroon House Press’s Tolipothy: The Root Awakens adds a fungus to the list, waking to thought beneath the Amazon.

Table of Contents

• What Makes a Non-Human Point of View Work?
• The Classics: Animal Narrators
• Dogs, Cats, and the People They Watch
• Insects, Spiders, and Trees
• From the House: Tolipothy
• How to Read These Books
• FAQ

What Makes a Non-Human Point of View Work?

Every novel asks you to live inside someone else for a while. A non-human point of view raises the stakes, because the writer cannot lean on the reader’s assumptions about what a person notices or wants. A rabbit does not care about a sunset. A worker bee does not choose her job. A dog knows its people by smell before it knows them by name.

The strongest books in this tradition take those limits seriously and turn them into structure. The creature’s senses decide what gets described. Its needs decide what counts as plot. Its world has its own laws, and the drama comes from what happens when those laws are tested or broken. The weaker books simply give an animal a human voice and a human problem. The difference is usually obvious by the end of the first chapter.

The Classics: Animal Narrators

The form is older than most readers assume, and several of its first famous examples were written to change how people treated animals.

1. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell (1877). Told by a horse across a working life of kind owners and cruel ones. Sewell’s only novel, it was written in part to argue against the harsh treatment of working horses, and it still reads as a book about labor and ownership as much as about animals.
2. The Call of the Wild, Jack London (1903). Buck, a comfortable household dog, is stolen and sold into sled work in the Yukon. The story follows him as the rules of his old life stop applying and older instincts take over.
3. Tarka the Otter, Henry Williamson (1927). The life of an otter in the rivers of Devon, written with close attention to landscape, weather, and the hunt. It is one of the books that shaped modern nature writing.
4. Watership Down, Richard Adams (1972). A band of rabbits leaves a doomed warren in search of a new home. Adams gave them a language, a mythology, and a politics, and the novel is as much about leadership and tyranny as survival.

Dogs, Cats, and the People They Watch

Some of the most affecting non-human narrators are domestic animals, because they live inside human lives without fully belonging to them. They see everything and control almost nothing.

5. I Am a Cat, Natsume Sōseki (1905–1906). A nameless cat observes the household of a schoolteacher in Meiji-era Tokyo. The result is a comic, sharp portrait of human vanity from someone who has no reason to flatter anyone.
6. Flush, Virginia Woolf (1933). A playful biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, following him from an English sickroom to Italy. Woolf builds much of the book out of smell.
7. Timbuktu, Paul Auster (1999). Mr. Bones, a dog, stays beside his dying owner, a homeless poet, and then has to find his way alone. It is short, funny in places, and hard to shake.
8. The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein (2008). Enzo, a dog, tells the story of his family’s hardest years while waiting to become human in his next life.
9. Fifteen Dogs, André Alexis (2015). Two gods make a bet and give fifteen dogs in a Toronto veterinary clinic human intelligence. The novel follows what that gift costs them. It won the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Insects, Spiders, and Trees

Moving further from the human body is where the form gets strange, and where some of the most ambitious recent novels live.

10. The Bees, Laline Paull (2014). Flora 717 is born into the lowest caste of a hive, built only to clean. The hive has a queen, a religion, and a police force, and Flora’s refusal to stay in her place drives the book.
11. Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky (2015). On a terraformed planet, spiders exposed to an engineered virus evolve into a civilization over generations. Their chapters are some of the most convincing non-human minds in science fiction. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
12. The Overstory, Richard Powers (2018). Its point-of-view characters are human, but trees sit at the center of the novel’s structure and argument, and the book is built to make a reader feel time at a tree’s scale. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

From the House: Tolipothy

What sets Tolipothy apart on this list is its law. In the forest the book builds, a thing that grows does not move, and the trees remember what happened to the last things that broke that rule. Tolipothy breaks it to protect the family she made from her own body, with bees, termites, and an ancient jaguar circling her and a stranger threat gathering at the forest’s edge. Like The Bees and Watership Down, it asks whether the laws that bind the living world are laws at all, or only habits waiting to be broken.

The novel is Christian Ruff’s debut, written with Nikki Woods. It began as a way to coax his wife back to her art, and its five Limbs are drawn from Christian and his brothers and sisters. It is available in paperback and on Kindle, and you can find it on our literary fiction shelf.

How to Read These Books

Start with one classic and one contemporary title, and read them side by side. Black Beauty and The Bees make a good pair: both are about a creature born into work it did not choose. Watership Down and Children of Time pair well as books about a species building a society. Tolipothy and The Overstory both ask a reader to think at the scale of root systems rather than individual lives.

As you read, notice what each writer leaves out. The details a narrator never mentions tell you as much about how that mind works as the details it does. If you like speculative fiction that builds whole societies, our guide to Black diaspora science fiction is a natural next stop. For new releases from the press, join the Maroon House Reader.

FAQ

What is a non-human narrator?

A narrator who is not a person: an animal, insect, plant, or other living thing whose senses and needs shape how the story is told. Some books use a first-person voice, like Enzo in The Art of Racing in the Rain, and others stay close to the creature in the third person, like Buck in The Call of the Wild.

What is the most famous novel told from an animal’s point of view?

Black Beauty and Watership Down are the two most often named. Black Beauty, narrated by a horse, dates to 1877, and Watership Down, about a band of rabbits, to 1972.

Are there novels told from a plant or fungus point of view?

Fewer than animal stories, which is part of what makes them interesting. Richard Powers’s The Overstory puts trees at the center of its structure, and Tolipothy: The Root Awakens centers a fungus that wakes to thought beneath the Amazon.

Are non-human narrator novels for children?

Some began as children’s books or are read that way, but most on this list were written for adults. Fifteen Dogs, The Bees, Children of Time, and The Overstory are adult literary and speculative fiction.

Recommended reading

• Black Diaspora Science Fiction Starter Shelf for Readers and Scholars
• Caribbean Dystopian Novels: 9 Speculative Books to Read
• Literary Fiction from Maroon House Press