Laura Jean McKay’s debut novel The Animals in That Country has won the 2021 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Book of the Year. The annual Arthur C. Clarke Award is given for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year.
27 September, 2021
The Animals in That Country wins the 2021 Arthur C. Clarke Award
Laura has also won the 2021 Victorian Prize for Literature, the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, the 2021 ABIA Small Publisher’s Adult Book of the Year Award, and tied for first place for the 2020 Aurealis Awards’ Best Science Fiction Novel. She has been shortlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize, and the 2020 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, and has been longlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Congratulations to Laura and all the shortlisted authors.
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The Animals in That Country
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, heading south, 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. Bold, exhilarating, and wholly original, The Animals in That Country asks what would happen, for better or worse, if we finally understood what animals were saying.
