[16] The novel is a speculative fiction book about communication between species sparked by a pandemic, and was inspired by her experiences of the chikungunya virus caught at a writer's festival in Bali in 2013.
[1][2][4] McKay said of her experiences recording the audiobook in March 2020:[17] I had spent years concocting the most impossible virus, only to witness a disease beyond my imagination infecting, killing and driving the real world towards global isolation.
It was a relief to get back into the booth and read the sections of the book where the animals start talking.The title is a homage to an early poetry collection by Margaret Atwood.
[2][30] The director of the award said "the novel speaks for the silent victims of our real-world climate crises, but while the environmental and social themes are deeply serious, our judges also praised the book's dark humour, sense of character and place, and its active opposition to easy genre tropes".
[34] The Saturday Paper said it "extends and deepens the achievement" of The Animals in That Country, with a similar focus on non-human perspectives, and that the stories in the collection range "from darkly comic surreal flashes to uncomfortably realistic portraits of life in a world of precarious work and disintegrating social safety nets".
[35] Nina Allan in The Guardian said that with this collection McKay "reaffirms her virtuosic ability to twist consensus reality into unfamiliar shapes", and that "as readers we should pay careful attention to what its singularly talented author has to say to us".