Sheep

The Egyptians worshipped them, the Romans dressed them in fitted coats, the Christians made the shepherd synonymous with their divine saviour. In Sheep, Philip Armstrong traces the natural and cultural history of both the wild and domestic species of Ovis: from the Old World mouflon to the corkscrew-horned flocks of the Egyptians, to the ‘Trojan sheep’ of Homer’s Odyssey, to the vast migratory mobs of Spanish merinos - all the way to Dolly the cloned ewe and the sheep-human hybrids of Haruki Murakami. Above all else, Sheep demonstrates that sometimes the most mundane animals turn out to be the most surprising.

In Sheep, a superb volume that more than meets the high bar set in the Reaktion Books Animal Series, the animal-studies scholar Philip Armstrong notes that no other domestic animal fades from view, even as we use it, quite as completely as the sheep - before setting this situation to rights. - The Times Literary Supplement