Allen & Unwin Jeremy and Amy book History English Paperback 320 pages

Jeremy Keeling first met Amy, an abandoned orang-utan, in the 1980s when he was looking after the private menagerie of music impresario Gordon Mills. Amy had been born to an orang-utan with no maternal instincts and Jeremy, feeling a connection with the rejected primate, hand-reared her. A friendship was forged that would become the defining relationship of both their lives. One day in 1984, when Jeremy was driving along with one-year-old Amy sitting beside him in the passenger seat, he fell asleep at the wheel and caused a horrific car crash. The first policemen on the scene were staggered to see amidst the wreckage of the upturned car, a hairy, non-human hand cradling Jeremy's head, keeping it clear of the glass and twisted metal: Amy had saved his life. For Jeremy, it was to be a long convalescence, but three years later he finally found a way of repaying his debt to Amy, when he met Jim Cronin, a tough-talking primate-lover from the Bronx, who shared his vision of creating a sanctuary for abused and abandoned monkeys. Pooling their meagre resources the two men took on a derelict pig farm in Dorset and over the next thirty years, slowly transformed it into a 65-acre, cage-less sanctuary for beleaguered primates, rescued from poachers and scientists on daring raids all over the world. Monkey World is now internationally famous and attracts some 800,000 visitors a year. This book is a story of high-wire adventure, of grit and determination and at its heart an inspiring and life-changing friendship between one man and his ape.