Benoît killed his friend Felipe, when they were both child soldiers, therefore his friend is with him still: loyal, angry, tiny and formidable. Since it's what happens when you have killed someone, my best bet is that the animal represents the spirit of the dead: Zinzi believes she killed her brother, therefore she carries little brother Thando everywhere with her, his soft arms around her neck, his dear weight on her back.

Perhaps it's the concrete manifestation of a southern African belief about straying spirits. Spiritually dead psychopaths and sociopaths need not apply – or so we are told, though at least three totally evil psychos later turn up animalised. Perhaps it's a redemptive punishment for the redeemable criminal. Perhaps it was triggered by a nuclear accident. The 'animalled' phenomenon, we learn, dates back to the 1980s, a plague with a trajectory strikingly similar to the Aids epidemic. Why a sloth? Could that be a reference to Zinzi's besetting sin, the moral laziness that is eating her hollow, as she sinks ever deeper into nasty petty crime, in a failed recovery from drug addiction and prison? Or could it be that Beukes just likes sloths? Maybe she read the same webpage as I did, where wiccan pundit Patti Wigington opines that 'No one will ever tell you their totem animal is the wombat, the hedgehog or the three-toed sloth.' Strength, size and courage don't necessarily work in the mean streets of Beukes's urban South Africa. There is a bear, but he, or she, only turns up to get killed, in the novel's most atmospheric and spooky set-piece. Zinzi December's animal is a sloth, boyfriend Benoît harbours a mongoose other denizens of Zoo City (the run down area of Johannesburg which has become a ghetto for the 'animalled') have attracted scorpions, sunbirds, vervet monkeys. Not so in Lauren Beukes's much-feted Zoo City, which has just won the Arthur C Clarke award.

Something big, famous and charismatic, anyway.

However, human nature being what it is, shamanic/pagan/wiccan types inhabiting globalised urban society tend to feel they've been chosen by an eagle, a wolf or a bear. I n pagan/wiccan/shamanic circles the world over, it is agreed that you don't choose your power animal, or familiar.

Zoo city by lauren beukes