THE WOMAN AND THE APE by Peter Hoeg

Adam Burden is approaching the culmination of his life's ambitions: domestic bliss in the form of a beautiful and devoted Danish wife, Madelene; professional success in the promised appointment to run a radically reorganized and extended London zoo as the world's leading forum for enlightened animal conservation. To clinch it all he possesses on his own premises a 'highly intelligent anthropoid ape' (illegally imported) that will inevitably require the zoology textbooks to be rewritten. But there is always a fly in the ointment: if her husband has plans, so does Madelene - and so, it happens, does Erasmus, the ape. An elopement takes place. And the search that results, throughout London and the Home Counties, is not merely for a missing Danish beauty and an anthropoid. It is for a number of certainties without which Man cannot live: as a distinguished audience of experts is told at Burden's inauguration, it is hard to tell, in each one of us, where this part that you call human ends and the part you call animal begins.

Soft cover, fairly good condition. Slight foxing, pen inscription on the front page.