In the novel’s alternative near future three seemingly unrelated plotlines intertwine into a tight knot.

In Moscow, a strongman ruler – whom his intimates call Coach and others are instructed not to address directly – faces a growing problem with crows. The priests are the first to be attacked by the aggressive and unusually intelligent birds, but Coach himself appears to be their ultimate target. The ruler’s entourage reads his erratic and violent response towards birds as a sign of declining mental health and, more importantly, of weakness. An attempted coup d’etat finds Coach sequestered in his fortress residence with his disenchanted mistress and their child. They, too, have been forced to hide indoors from aggressive crows.

The Coach and his family are placed under home arrest, while the guards undermine his authority by continuously provoking both him and his family, trying to make him snap. But to Coach himself, the only way to escape the nightmare is to join and head up the mystical forces aligned against him, to fly with the crows – and to get a message to a loyal general. By the time the coup is defeated, Coach perceives himself simultaneously as man and crow, ready to wage his wars in ways no ordinary man could ever imagine.

In Atlanta, Lex, a young biochemist at a medium-sized pharma company, leads a small team conducting obesity pill research. Lex’ unusual emotional intelligence and gentle hands make her the favorite of the lab rats used in the experiments. Eager to make contact with Lex – and no one else – the rats display various near-human behaviors. When the researcher shares her experience with colleagues and her superior, Cheol, she is immediately suspected of burnout and drug use. Not to be deterred by the institutional resistance and the unfamiliar scientific terrain, Lex smuggles in forbidden equipment and embarks on a series of experiments with a brain-computer interface to decipher the message the rats want to communicate. When she finally succeeds, the message is one of unspeakable suffering. Fired from the firm when Cheol covets her findings, Lex takes her program to academia and her results to the public, finding herself at the head of a powerful movement driven by compassion not only for animals but for victims of all forms of oppression.

In Berlin, Rainer Radtke runs one of several happiness models for EGAL, a think-tank-like organization that has been running Germany since, in the middle of a pandemic, the political establishment peacefully handed over power to the experts. Rainer’s job is to track hundreds of real-time data feeds and suggest policy measures to make sure the population’s happiness level doesn’t drop below 70%. Rainer himself, however, no longer believes in scientific governance since a city planning decision resulted in the demolition of his childhood home and the death of his father.

He rebels by running an underground pub in a gloomy village an hour’s drive from Berlin and by breeding chihuahuas in defiance of a nationwide dog ban. The chihuahua business unexpectedly brings him into contact with a loose grouping of anti-expert dissidents and retired politicians bent on returning to power – and badly in need of canine companionship. Rainer helps his new friends wreck the models to escalate public discontent.

When the three plotlines finally intersect during a series of surreal conference calls between government buildings in Moscow, D.C. and Berlin, it’s clear that the state of the world is precarious as rarely before – and that the story doesn’t end here.

At once a brisk social commentary and a thrilling roller-coaster dystopia, Animal Tested showcases a colorful array of vivid characters, surprising the readers at every page turn with smartly concocted plot twists as well as dramatic psychological transformations. Bershidsky elegantly leads the readers as we probe the notions of power, control, intelligence, empathy

– and freedom.

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