In a country house in England a precocious teenage exile from revolutionary Russia sets down his adventures on paper, beginning with his first ball in St Petersburg and how he frees a huge African elephant from a cruel circus. But a hundred years later an American academic feels the boy may have invented the elephant as the only kind and uplifting being in dark times.

About the Author
Paul Pickering is the author of six novels: Wild About Harry, Perfect English, The Blue Gate of Babylon, Charlie Peace, The Leopard's Wife and Over the Rainbow. The Blue Gate of Babylon was a New York Times notable book of the year, who dubbed it 'superior literature'. Often compared to Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Pickering was chosen as one of the top ten young British novelists by bookseller WH Smith and has been long-listed for the Booker Prize three times. The novelist J.G. Ballard said Pickering's work is 'truly subversive'. As well as short stories and poetry, he has written several plays, film scripts and columns for The Times and Sunday Times. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.

Reviews

What Elephant provides to the reader is a gloriously absorbing story about storytelling, as rich in suspense and vitality as it is in incidents and images that dare you to disbelieve them. An ice-bound Russian lake is filled with the frozen bodies of neatly dressed office girls. A zeppelin appears above Wentworth Woodhouse, equipped with a harnessed undercarriage that can carry a full-grown Indian elephant away from imminent danger.

-- Miranda Seymour * Financial Times *

At the centre of Pickering's meticulously researched narrative is the gigantic female elephant, a metaphor for lost innocence and uncorrupted simplicity the fast-industrialising capitalist world feels apprehensive of. Alexei's dream about 'the river of dark fire' is actually an echo of Schopenhauer's account of 'the anarchic, artistic Wille, the raw power behind creation'. The elephant, as Natasha fails to convince the emigres, 'is a counter to the inhumanity of our digital age'

-- Bhaskar Roy * Outlook Magazine *

I enjoyed Elephant hugely. Such an original and beguiling story. It is, like the best fiction, simultaneously so precise and particular, while yet resonating with so many contemporary universals ... An intensely readable and stirring novel.

-- Stephen Fry



Book Information
ISBN 9781784632250
Author Paul Pickering
Format Paperback
Page Count 400
Imprint Salt Publishing
Publisher Salt Publishing
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 30mm