Jean is an older woman in Australia who loves her granddaughter, alcohol, cigarettes, her job as a tour guide at a zoo, and a dingo named Sue, maybe in that order. A virus is sweeping the country that causes the sufferers to be able to understand animals (somewhat), and to communicate back (somewhat). This isn't the Dr. Dolittle experience of overly anthropomorphized animals thinking and talking like humans; here, animals are still animals, and their thoughts and expressions are still somewhat alien, communicated with body language more than sounds. The book won a number of literary awards, but I didn't love it. For one thing, I think Jean is supposed to win our hearts, but she didn't win mine - her flaws are significant and she doesn't seem to grow over the course of the story (which, to be fair, is more likely than the characters in so many stores who go from being horrible to being saintly). For another, though I appreciated McKay’s attempt at representing communication with animals in a more realistic way, I found it frustrating. In some places, I think I was supposed to understand what the animals were saying, but I didn't. In other places, the animal thoughts seemed too complex or philosophical to be realistic. I didn't hate the story, and I can see why some people really enjoyed it, but I found myself happy to move on to the next book.