Lucy

When primatologist Jenny Lowe rescues a young girl from the chaos of civil war in the Congo, she believes she is simply giving an orphan a new home. As Jenny reads through her late colleague's research journals, she uncovers a truth that reframes everything she thought she understood about the child she has come to love. Gonzales uses this premise to probe urgent questions about what defines humanity, where science crosses into transgression, and how bonds of love form across the boundaries of species and identity.

Abby Craden and Kim Mai Guest share narration duties with a complementary dynamic that serves the story's dual emotional register. Craden brings warmth and grounded intelligence to Jenny's perspective, while Guest handles passages that reflect Lucy's own distinctive inner life with a subtle, otherworldly quality. The dual-narrator structure reinforces the novel's central tension without ever feeling gimmicky. At just under eleven hours, the pacing is tight enough to hold tension across the full runtime.