Johan Gabrielsen

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 at the park.

Well, that's part of it.

It's a really complicated response.

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

is this isn't dr doolittle 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

But then so some people outside are starting to kill animals because it is so confronting for them.

And what's also confronting is what the animals start to tell us.

And that's one of the kind of amazing parts of the book, I think.

It's really fantastic.

So, for example, just to give the specific sort of example you were just talking about there, like there's an absolutely harrowing scene, I think, where Jean is having to deal with the mice that have just been raised in the park to feed the reptiles.

There's this amazing description of the mice that are sort of screaming death with a yellow gas type smell.

And so that's part of the beauty of this book is that

that the animal language is so complicated.

It's not just what we would think in the sounds.

It's the way their fur moves, the way their body moves, their smells.