The Oldest Bitch Alive

"Captivating . . . A work of quiet and yet spirited exhilaration." --Edward P. Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World

A polyphonic debut following an aging French bulldog and the parasitic worms that send her toward death -- a singular, sly novel about form, freedom, interiors, and the matter by which we are composed and consumed.

Gelsomina is a French Bulldog who leads a routine life in a glass house. One day, she ingests an orb of parasitic worms who make an imperfect home inside her. Approaching death, yet filled with new life, she begins to see everything differently: her attachment to the designer-architect couple with whom she lives; the naive preoccupations of their younger French Bulldog, Zampanò; her feelings for an elusive fox; and the voids within and beyond her. The worms propel Gelsomina to plumb the meaning of her domestic existence and ask if her rebirth lies in the wild unknown outside the panes.

The Oldest Bitch Alive is a polyphonic story of containment refracting across scales. Revolving perspectives meditate on consciousness, theories of everything, multispecies narratives, philosophies of form and the immaterial, and other ways in which matter is composed and consumed. Gelsomina's introspections culminate in an ecstatic sprint through a natural world she's never seen, awakening the French Bulldog to the depths of love, reverence, death, and the bound self in dichromatic color.

Author: Morgan Day
Publisher: Astra House
Published: 03/24/2026
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.36h x 5.60w x 0.95d
ISBN: 9781662603372


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2026
Publishers Weekly 01/19/2026

About the Author
Morgan Day is a fiction and architecture writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Ecotone Magazine, Gulf Coast Journal, Worms Magazine, and elsewhere. The Oldest Bitch Alive is her first novel.