Adam Begley

An avian allegory: Dinosaurs, by Lydia Millet, reviewed

Rich, lonely Gil escapes to Arizona after an unhappy love affair and devotes himself to helping neighbours and threatened birds – whose plights are closely linked

Gambel’s quail in the Arizona desert. [Getty Images] 
issue 15 October 2022

Adapt or die. That brutal Darwinian dictum is too blunt to serve as the motto of Dinosaurs, Lydia Millet’s slim, quietly powerful 12th novel, but the threat of extinction, implicit in the title, hovers in the air. Bird-obsessed – our feathered friends are ‘the last of the dinosaurs’ – the novel tracks two years in the life of a ‘stricken’ character who feels ‘less than whole’.

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