J.J. is back living at home in Adelaide, unemployed and drifting after a messy divorce. Then he is offered a job teaching Sign to Eliza. His new pupil is smart, sensitive, attractive - and a gorilla recently liberated from a medical research laboratory by animal rights activists.
First published in 1995, the third novel by the acclaimed writer Peter Goldsworthy is unique in Australian literature: a dazzling, moving story about scientific experimentation and ethics, language and love.
This edition comes with a new introduction by James Bradley.
Peter Goldsworthy has won the FAW Christina Stead Prize for fiction, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and a Helpmann Award, shared with the composer Richard Mills, for the opera Batavia. His poetry and novels have been widely translated; four of his novels and the short story 'The Kiss' have been adapted for the stage. His most recent book is the short-story collection Gravel, shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal for Literature. This year Penguin is publishing His Stupid Boyhood, a comic memoir, and Maestro, his debut novel, is being reissued as an Angus & Robertson Australian Classic.
'[Goldsworthy's] greatest achievement...Brave, brilliant, as intellectually challenging as it is playful, it is testament to a restless and unpredictable imagination.' James Bradley
'Stylish, imaginative, poignant, and hugely unsettling.' Australian
'A deeply satisfying book...represents a new achievement in his fiction...Read it. You won't find another novel like it.' Adelaide Review