At the age of thirty-eight, Elen finds herself unmoored in one of America's Happiest Cities. Suddenly alone after her husband disappears, she finds herself without a home or job, and spends her days drinking in the shadows of the Cascade Mountains. There she encounters a group of four friends, Luka, Clover, George and Lyn - young, rich, and English. They are wealthy drifters, professional squatters, who tour ski resorts and break into empty Airbnbs. Inspired by the ideas of the 18th century utopian socialist Charles Fourier, they're looking for a new way to be in the world - and to have a good time.

When they bring Elen into their fold - and into their messy, entangled romantic relationships - she remains invisibly separated by their privilege, and by the optimism this privilege confers. But she is not immune to their allure - or to the disastrous fallout that threatens to flow from their reckless abandon, the horror never far from the surface of their seemingly perfect lives. Vital, cultish, and at times insufferable - can they give Elen something she doesn't know she needs? And what is it that they want from her? Are darker forces at play in their utopian dreams?

A meditation on the often irresistible pull of different ways of living, the dangers and seductive power of youthful idealism, and the slippages between friendship and love, Winter Animals is a beguiling debut novel, reminiscent of Donna Tartt and Jessica Andrews, that examines freedom, friendship, desire, and excess.