Bibliograph

The poison oracle, Peter Dickinson

Type

Label

The poison oracle, Peter Dickinson

Language

eng

Index

no index present

Literary Form

fiction

Main title

The poison oracle

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Responsibility statement

Peter Dickinson

Summary

Take a medieval Arab kingdom, add a ruler who wants to update the kingdom's educational facilities, include an English research psycholinguist (an Oxford classmate of the ruler) invited to pursue his work on animal communication, and then add a touch of chaos in Dinah, a chimpanzee who has begun to learn to form coherent sentences with plastic symbols. When a murder is committed in the oil-rich marshes, Dinah is the only witness, and Morris has to go into the marshes to dis-cover the truth. The Poison Oracle is a novel of its time that exposes in the everyday language people use humanity's thinking and unthinking cruelties to one another and to the animals with whom we share this earth

Target audience

adult

Classification