Talk to Me
A Novel

Sam is a young chimp who’s been taught American Sign Language and uses it to talk to his handlers: Guy, a young professor, and his girlfriend/assistant, Aimee. But when funding for the chimp project runs out and the group is disbanded, what will happen to Sam? I always check out whenever TC Boyle pu......more

I've been reading TC Boyle for the past 30 years or so, and while sometimes he falters, mostly he soars, as in this account of the attempts to bridge the species by performing studies on a chimp that has been raised by humans since birth. Sam is adorable, calculating, able to perform amazing feats o......more

Let me start with a rant: the way we treat our fellow animals is nothing short of a disgrace. A chimp shares 98.9% of his DNA with a human being. Yet we believe that the 1.1% difference gives us the right to test and prod and abuse and discard and betray because we fool ourselves into believing we a......more

Talk To Me is a lively, thought-provoking novel exploring animal consciousness, what it means to be human, to communicate with another and to truly know another person—or animal. It's the late 1970s when animal behaviourist and brilliant young professor of psychology Guy Schermerhorn, disciple of th......more

Do animals have souls?Are they self aware? Can they think, plan, even lie? In this story which takes place in the 1970s, Dr Donald Moncrief of Davenport University in Iowa has pioneered the cross-fostering of chimpanzees in human home environments with a focus on language acquisition and comparative......more