Format: Paperback
Pages: 416
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Year: 1998

After a night of routine debauchery in London's clubland, the artist Simon Dykes falls asleep - only to wake up to find his girlfriend has been transmogrified into a chimp. Indeed the whole of London, though functioning normally, is run and inhabited by chimps. Can the great chimp-doctor, Zack Busner, cure him of his illusion that he's human? A wonderfully funny and clever novel that manages too to evoke great feelings of pity and sadness in the reader, this is in effect a meditation on how we treat animals.

Like Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, Great Apes is a strange and twisted tale, a surreal satire on the human condition, and an omen for those who wander too far. After a long night of partying, Simon Dykes, a successful British painter, wakes up to find that his girlfriend has turned into a chimpanzee. In fact, the world Simon once knew has become a planet of apes. Convinced he is still human, Simon is confined to the emergency ward of a hospital and put under the care of Dr. Zack Busner, clinical psychologist, radical psychoanalyst, maverick drug researcher, and media personality. Written with the glittering satiric edge that is Self's hallmark, Great Apes is a hilarious, disturbing, and truly unforgettable novel.

Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including Great Apes; The Book of Dave; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; and Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lives in South London.