This week's Book of the Week has just been awarded Australia's richest literary prize. Its author lives in Palmerston North. The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay has as its protagonist a chain-smoking, foul-mouthed alcoholic grandmother who, as the result of a pandemic, is suddenly able to understand the speech of animals and sets off, accompanied by a dingo, to find her granddaughter in an Australia in which the relationship of humans to their environment and to other animals has been drastically reconfigured. 
>>Read Stella's review. 
>>Stella reviews the book on Radio NZ. 
>>Laura Jean McKay talks with Kim Hill. 
>>The author interviewed by a dog. 
>>On winning the Victorian Prize for Literature. 
>>Other consciousnesses and the the limits of language. 
>>Stranger than fiction. 
>>With her back to the sea.
>>A Kafkaesque crisis. 
>>Interspecies Communication in Contemporary Literature. 
>>The author's website. 
>>Read the book!