The Sheep who Changed the World by Neil Astley

A rumbustious comic fantasy about a cloned ram with human genes who takes on the Establishment

Highly topical and politically subversive

Author shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2002 for The End of My Tether

A mad scientist has given a cloned sheep his own gene for human intelligence. Matching his creator's cunning, the plucky ram educates himself in secret, learning language and human ways while planning his escape from the laboratory. Once at large, he takes on fanatics, terorists, multinationals and the army - as well as Holly, a cloned ewe trained in honeytrap espionage - as he plots the downfall of the Batty fundamentalists in the Men's Republic of Battymanistan who turned his donor parent into doner kebab.

The Sheep Who Changed the World is an outrageously picaresque black-sheep comedy which follows the fortunes and foibles of the crafty ram as he confronts his dual nature as both sheep and man. The sheep soon discovers that the only way to bring the absurd human world into harmony with his own totally logical ovine metaphysics is by getting rid of everything he finds ridiculous.

Neil Astley's second novel is a politically provocative farce, a rollicking romp of a read, in which a talking sheep has the last word and the whole world listens.

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Reviews of The Sheep who Changed the World

	10 May 2006
Publication: Scotland on Sunday
The protagonist of Astley's second novel is a cloned sheep whose DNA incorporates the human gene for "intelligence and language acquisition", and who launches a Messianic vision for humanity's future. Everything is rendered in cartoon colours, from the groan-worthy names (Frank Stein, Sheikh Rattlenroll) to the heavy-handed satire, where Astley pontificates about American imperialism, religious fundamentalism and the military mindset. On the few occasions when subtler emotions are attempted, the prose is clunky. I only hope the Sheep's New Age manifesto is another stab at satire. There is an undergraduate quality to this novel: it is silly, brash and not as clever as it thinks. Try instead: Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog
	30 April 2007
Reviewed by customer: Z Hand
I was hoping for something a lot better. Unfortunately the book is racist, sexist, full of itself (and its contemporary examples) and lacking knowledge on sheep, science, DNA, genetics, ethnicities, different cultures, the reason we created a sewage system, the media and human ways. It is very utilitarian. If you have no issue with the idea of a perfect world being one where people labelled as being against the way of the "people" are subject to public humiliation, and where innocents can be sacrificed for the "greater good" (killing "baddies") then go ahead and purchase this book. It is very unfortunate that the author failed to the see the irony of the way he viewed the superior world to function. Z Hand

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