Written by Gareth Stein and illustrated by Matthew Southworth, The Cloven is a trilogy of books about James Tucker, the world’s most successful cloned human. The trouble is, he isn’t a clone of two humans, but a cross between a human and a goat.
All Tucker wants is to get on with his life, but that’s not easy when you’re only partly human. After a disastrous attempt at fitting in at university, he goes on a road trip to try and find a place to belong.
“This is a story about the manipulation of Truth that we live with constantly in our society, the fragmentation of reality. A world where facts are malleable; where genetic ‘experiments’ live in the margins while we look the other way; where billionaires and secret societies decide the fate of our world; where we believe the scripted television news over something we’ve actually seen; and yet where searching for one’s place in the world — searching for one’s home — is still the most powerful yearning of a person’s soul.”
Gareth Stein
The Cloven: Book 1 is available from Fantagraphics from 28 July.