This is the paperback edition of a curious, reverberant little book first published last year by Princeton University Press. It consists of two lectures set within a fiction involving the lecturer, Elizabeth Costello, a passionate animal rights promoter, and her son John, a teacher at Appleton College, where the talks are to be delivered. In fact, the two texts, "The Philosophers and the Animals" and "The Poets and the Animals", were written and read by Coetzee as the Tanner Lectures at Princeton in 1997-8. In the hardback edition the "lectures" were themselves framed by a set of scholarly responses - one from Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation - which are dropped in the paperback edition, unwisely, perhaps, as they did expand the debate. The contention of Costello/Coetzee is that our treatment of animals is wholly indefensible, immoral, and comparable to the Nazi treatment of the Jews. This is a stimulating, deeply disturbing book, with implications that reach into all lives, human as well as animal.