Twenty years ago or so, after the international reading community discovered Danish author Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1992), I went on to read his Borderliners (1993) and The Woman and the Ape (1996). Both these books were speculative fiction featuring outsiders challenging ideas about what humanity might mean, but it was The Woman and the Ape which I still remember vividly, because, as the blurb at Goodreads says, the woman, Madelene Burden is:

… lonely and disillusioned despite her upper-crust London existence, she’s a modern-day sleeping beauty drowsing gently in an alcoholic stupor. But the prince whose kiss brings her to life is not tall, dark, and handsome. He’s a short, dark, 300-pound ape named Erasmus.

What made the book memorable was the way the initially confronting idea of a woman in love with an animal was transformed into a parable about where the next phase of human evolution might go…

Rose Malready’s novella The Bonobo’s Dream is also speculative fiction exploring the random way in which privileged people meet outsiders and have to confront their denial of reality. Likewise, it speculates about what the defining limits of humanity might be, but it covers territory both broader and less political in scope. The book won the 2016 Seizure Viva La Novella Prize and was a nominee for the Aurealis Awards, and it is also shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing in the 2017 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. It’s not easy to discuss without a –

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/04/30/the-bonobos-dream-b-y-rose-mulready/ ( )