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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 seven novels:
Wild About Harry,
Perfect English,
The Blue Gate of Babylon,
Charlie Peace,
The Leopard's Wife,
Over the Rainbow and
Elephant.
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 WHSmith 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.
Summary
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.
Report
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
