Returning to the African savannah where they study baboons, 14-year-old Gerry and his biologist parents go down in a plane crash. When Gerry awakens, his parents are gone and he is transformed. Suddenly, he is inhabiting the body of a runty baboon and must adapt to baboon ways or die. By watching the other animals closely, he learns to forage and find a place in the troop that his parents were observing, but his memories and reason cause him to act in human ways: he makes a weapon from stone, bone, and packing tape, uses a rifle to frighten off a farmer, and performs a mercy killing with morphine. Even as he grows increasingly comfortable with the baboons, he longs to return to his human body, which is lying in a coma in a hospital far away.

David Jones has stiff competition with his human-becomes-primate plot. It must be said that Peter Dickinson’s Eva – the not-to-be-missed story of a teenager whose brain is transplanted into the body of a chimp – is a significantly more daring and rewarding novel than Baboon.

That said, Jones has a light, easy way with information and a respectable knowledge of his subject matter. His portrait of baboon behaviour is convincing, neither overly dramatic nor overly educational, and the hook of the boy in a baboon’s body gives the story the edge of fascination it needs to suggest bigger questions about what it means to be human. Gerry’s adolescent insecurities, voiced in his memories about school life back home, are put into the broader perspective of the animal world. “Living with a troop is hard,” he writes once he has returned to human form. “Living without it is impossible. Somehow you have to find a way to fit in.”