The Animals in That Country

Written by Laura Jean McKay

Narrated by Helen Langford

Out on the road, no one speaks, everything talks.

Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She's never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. And although Jean talks to all her charges, she has a particular soft spot for a young dingo called Sue.

As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realizes this is no ordinary flu: its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals-first mammals, then birds and insects, too. As the flu progresses, the unstoppable voices become overwhelming, and many people begin to lose their minds, including Jean's infected son, Lee. When he takes off with Kimberly, Jean feels the pull to follow her kin.

Setting off on their trail, with Sue the dingo riding shotgun, they find themselves in a stark, strange world in which the animal apocalypse has only further isolated people from other species. The Animals in That Country asks what would happen, for better or worse, if we finally understood what animals were saying.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: May 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798765017302

Laura Jean McKay

Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country (Scribe, 2020) — winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Victorian Prize for Literature, and the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year, and co-winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Laura is also the author of Holiday in Cambodia (Black Inc., 2013). She was awarded the NZSA Waitangi Day Literary Honours in 2022.

Reviews for The Animals in That Country

[Eleasha · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Absolutely fantastic book. The premise alone is so original, unique, and fascinating, but the execution takes it even higher. In the hands of a less skilled author this story could have been insipid and predictable, a moralistic fable told via a twee twist of fabulism, but it is anything but. The protagonist is deeply flawed and interesting, nothing in the plot happens quite how you'd expect, and at every turn I was enthralled and terribly emotionally invested. I wouldn't change a thing about this wonderful book, it was unsettling, beautiful, and riveting from beginning to end.