Aoife Clifford

Because I was thinking Australia Zoo, definitely.

Well, I mean, it's a really big something.

A flu has hit in the southern parts of Australia and so they are starting to get these kind of images on television that are a bit upsetting but yet seem so separate from their lives.

But it turns out that the flu has some very unusual side effects and at the same time there's a wave of eco-terrorists that are breaking into zoos and letting animals out.

And it seems the two things are related.

And what it turns out is that this is a zoo flu.

And one of the side effects is that you can start to understand animals.

This develops quite rapidly to be a huge problem for the park.

And they have to go essentially into lockdown because outside the park are these kind of eerie people with pink eyes wanting to break in because they want to start communicating with the wild animals.

Talk to the animals.

It's brilliant and bonkers.

It's fantastic.

Well, that's part of it.

It's a really complicated response.

And that's one of the wonderful things about this book is

is this isn't Dr. Dolittle, everyone starts talking the Queen's English.

It's really amazingly complicated.

It's complicated in the way that the animals speak and it's complicated in that people's responses to that.

So some people are almost worshipful of the animals and there's like even humorous parts, like we're talking on all those sort of complications in the book, but there's lots of humor in the book.

And one of the rangers becomes like really obsessed by ants in a really comic kind of way.