Vera Drake

Vera Drake begins The Last Animal as a thirteen-year-old girl, carted to Siberia by her mother, Jane, in the immediate aftermath of her father's death. Although Vera has lived a scintillating childhood following her parents in their travels through the scientific world, the death of her father has disrupted her sense of security and normalcy, and she finds herself yearning for a "normal" childhood, one that does not include her mother's jet-setting lifestyle. She also begins to develop anxieties about the pending climate disaster, shunning the laissez-faire attitude that her sister, Eve, often expresses when confronted with the notion of global apocalypse.

Vera's life changes significantly after she finds a frozen and well-preserved mammoth corpse alongside her sister while wandering the tundra of Siberia. When the discovery leads Jane to commit an illegal act and cart her daughters with her to a large, imposing castle in Italy...