Billy Griffiths

And I think that's something which I often think about and I think it's a beautiful guiding philosophy.

Yes, of course.

The narrator is the voice that binds the book.

And it is a 13,354-year-old fossil of an American mammoth.

And they are in Manhattan, March 2007, and they're at a natural history auction.

So this mammoth, who likes to be called Mammut, is up for sale and is feeling conversational.

He is our narrator, and he opens by hurling abuse at us, at people, at Homo sapiens, the detestable bipeds who he blames for his death and the end of his world, the end of his species.

At the very opening, he recalls with pleasure wiping the entrails of a human off his foot.

So we're very immediately met by not just a talking or thinking fossil, but one that has a strong voice and a fierce wit and also a peculiar way of constructing sentences and speaking.

He feels old-fashioned in many ways.

Well, although he's hurling abuse at us, at people, the people around, we can't hear him.

But he does share a room with many other fossils.

And this other voice is the skull of a 67 million year old Tyrannosaurus batar, who is also up for auction.

and who was exhumed from the Mongolian desert in 1991.

And these dates are important, we realise, because he is, you know, Tyrannosaurus Bataar, or T-Bataar, or as he likes to be called, T-Bat, speaks in teenage slang.

One of the beautiful...

gimmicks of the novel, or gimmicks is the wrong word, is that the fossils speak in the language of the era they were dug up in.

So Mammut emerged, it was

in 1801, and he speaks as the world in 1801 spoke.

T-Bat, Tyrannosaurus Bata, has a turn of phrase that is very much, he's a 16-year-old, and you can tell it when he describes when an asteroid hit the Earth, he goes, whammo, and reflects to the Stegosaurus next to him that he's a pretty chill dude and it doesn't really matter too much.