Life Of Pi

About the Book: Life of Pi

Winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize for fiction

After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, one solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The crew of the surviving vessel consists of a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang- utan, a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger and Pi - a 16-year-old Indian boy. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary pieces of literary fiction of recent years.

Yann Martel's Life of Pi is a transformative novel, a dazzling work of imagination that will delight and astound readers in equal measure. It is a triumph of storytelling and a tale that will, as one character puts it, make you believe in God.

About the Author: Yann Martel

Yann Martel was born in Spain but currently lives in Montreal. He is the hugely acclaimed author of Self, a novel, and of the story collection The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. Yann's delight of a novel, Life of Pi, is his third book and was the winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. It was also shortlisted for the Governor General Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2002.

Reviews

'Yann Martel is a vivid and entrancing story-teller. An inventive, shocking and ultimately uplifting story.' - Sunday Telegraph

'Impressive enough to make you, as the old man said, believe in God. . . Martel has hit on a marvellous notion and revels in elaborating it. . . The story positively sparkles with originality.' -The Scotsman

'Yann Martel's third work of fiction, Life of Pi, is a terrific book. It's fresh, original, smart, devious, and crammed with absorbing lore. . . Life of Pi is not just a readable and engaging novel, it's a finely twisted length of yarn. . . Like its noteworthy ancestors, among which I take to be Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, the Ancient Mariner, Moby Dick and Pincher Martin, it's a tale of disaster at sea coupled with miraculous survival - a boys' adventure for grownups.' -Margaret Atwood, Sunday Times

'In its subject and its style, this enormously lovable novel is suffused with wonder: a willed innocence that produces a fresh, sideways look at our habitual assumptions, about religious divisions, or zoos versus the wild, or the possibility of freedom. As Martel promises in his author's note, this is fiction probing the imaginative realm with scientific exactitude, twisting reality to 'bring out its essence.' - Justine Jordan, Guardian