(Allen & Unwin, $39.99)
If you’re in the mood for something other than the traditional girl meets boy romance or man murders woman crime, this is definitely the book for you.
There is romance and there is crime but mostly there are bonobo apes: the chimpanzee-like primates who are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.
In Ape House, scientist Isabel Duncan prefers working with the bonobos to working with humans and spends her days communicating with them by sign language in a university lab.
When extremists blow up the lab, Isabel is badly injured but the bonobos face a fate worse than death: they’re sold to a pornographer who turns them into a reality TV show.
Isabel can only watch with the millions of other viewers as the intelligent apes she can usually talk to like friends order greasy take-away food and sign for her to come and help them.
only when her beloved apes are so endangered can she try to reach out to the few other like-minded humans she can find, such as disillusioned reporter John and magenta-haired vegetarian Celia, to try to save her ape family from total destruction.
I am a total sucker for apes, with a particular soft spot for chimpanzees, of which bonobos are known as the pygmies so I was a shoo-in for this book. The bonobo details are all correct, and author Sara Gruen even visited the Great Ape Trust in the US and spent a day conversing with the apes there, which she says was a life-changing experience.
Any animal lover will want to read this and not just because part of the proceeds from all Sara Gruen’s books go to her favourite animal charities.
Her last novel, Water for Elephants, was an international bestseller so a lot of horses will be eating a lot of extra chaff because of her.
This engaging writer has quite the menagerie at home on her modern-day eco-commune too – at last count it included two horses, four cats, two dogs, two goats, three sons and a husband!
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