‘Startling, beautiful, and dangerous. McKay is the brightest of talents. We're lucky to have her.’

‘Amidst a pile of shed skin and fur, McKay moulds a kaleidoscopic and horrifyingly real portrait of life at the fringes. By turns gritty, surreal, and absurd, Gunflower isn’t afraid to weigh flesh on the scales of our own judgments, a delicate balancing act between life and death, connection and disconnection. Perhaps part Kelly Link and Ottessa Moshfegh, McKay delivers an assured follow-up to The Animals in That Country in her own singular voice that zeroes in on our anxieties and existential crises with deft and often poetic flair.’

‘Gunflower is like a swarm of small earthquakes: nothing is steady anymore, and the world feels bigger, scarier, almost transcendent in its strangeness.’

Praise for The Animals in That Country:

‘A fierce debut novel … Her writing about people is filthy, fresh, and funny; this is prose on high alert, hackles up and teeth bared in every sentence. The novel becomes both a stirring attempt to inhabit other consciousnesses and a wry demonstration of the limits of our own language and empathy.’

Praise for The Animals in That Country:

‘This is a game-changing, life-changing novel, the kind that comes along right when you need it, and compels you to listen to its terrifying poetry. Compulsively readable and yet also pushing the boundaries of what is possible in terms of language and narrative, this is a brilliant and disturbing book that will make you rethink everything you thought you understood about non-human animal sentience and agency. I don’t think any reader can ever forget a voice like Sue the dingo’s - wise and obscene in equal measure. A triumph.’

Praise for The Animals in That Country:

‘This is an absorbing and affecting book, and one to which I’m able to pay the highest compliment: that, in the days after finishing it, the world felt different to me, its animals not speaking but not silent either.’

Praise for The Animals in That Country:

‘The genius stroke of The Animals in That Country is the preternatural “body talk” of its animals … an affecting book, one that gets remarkably close to the unknowable wildness of animal sentience.’

Praise for The Animals in That Country:

‘Laura Jean McKay, an expert in animal communication, has her animals speaking in hallucinogenic haikus - it’s disturbing but compelling, and somehow totally believable. I loved every bizarre, unexpected moment.’

Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country (Scribe, 2020) - winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Victorian Prize for Literature, and the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year, and co-winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Laura is also the author of Holiday in Cambodia (Black Inc., 2013). She was awarded the NZSA Waitangi Day Literary Honours in 2022.