Talk to Me

when animal behaviorist Guy Schermerhom demonstrates on a TV game show that he has taught Sam, his juvenile chimp, to speak in sign language, Aimee Villard, an undergraduate at Guy's university, is so taken with the performance that she applies to become his assistant. A romantic and intellectual attachment soon morphs into an interspecies love triangle that pushes hard at the boundaries of consciousness and the question of what we know and how we know it. A wide-ranging and deeply moving novel, Talk to Me explores what it means to be human, to communicate with, and to truly know, another person - or animal.