The truth is, nobody knew why it happened this way, but in the town where I grew up, when the boys and girls reached a certain age, the parents locked themselves up in their houses, and the teenagers ran wild...

As a well-behaved and over-achieving teenager, Lumen Fowler knows she is different. While the rest of her peers are falling beneath the sway of her community's darkest rite of passage, she resists, choosing to hole herself up in her room with only books for company.

For Lumen has a secret. Her mother never 'breached' and she knows she won't either. But as she investigates the town's strange traditions and unearths stories from her family's past, she soon realises she may not know herself - or her wild side - at all...

A gothic coming-of-age tale for modern times, When We Were Animals is a dark, provocative journey of self discovery