Life of Pi: The Illustrated Edition - Hardcover

Yann Martel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841958492 ISBN 13: 9781841958491

Publisher: Canongate, 2007

After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, one solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg, a female orang-utan - and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger.

Since it was first published in 2002, Life of Pi has entered mainstream consciousness and remains one of the most extraordinary works of fiction in recent years.

In October 2005 Canongate launched a competition with The Times to find an artist to illustrate Yann Martel's international bestseller. Soon the competition expanded as the Globe and Mail and The Age newspapers also launched a search in Canada and Australia.

From thousands of entries, Croatian artist Tomislav Torjanac was chosen as the illustrator for this new edition of Life of Pi. Now readers can enjoy this extraordinary tale with his glorious colour illustrations.

Review:

Some books defy categorisation: Life of Pi, the second novel from Canadian writer Yann Martel, is a case in point: just about the only thing you can say for certain about it is that it is fiercely and admirably unique. The plot, if that’s the right word, concerns the oceanic wanderings of a lost boy, the young and eager Piscine Patel of the title (Pi). After a colourful and loving upbringing in gorgeously-hued India, the Muslim-Christian-animistic Pi sets off for a fresh start in Canada. His blissful voyage is rudely interrupted when his boat is scuppered halfway across the Pacific, and he is forced to rough it in a lifeboat with a hyena, a monkey, a whingeing zebra and a tiger called Richard. That would be bad enough, but from here on things get weirder: the animals start slaughtering each other in a veritable frenzy of allegorical bloodlust, until Richard the tiger and Pi are left alone to wander the wastes of ocean, with plenty of time to ponder their fate, the cruelty of the gods, the best way to handle storms and the various different recipes for oothappam, scrapple and coconut yam kootu. The denouement is pleasantly neat. According to the blurb, thirtysomething Yann Martel spent long years in Alaska, India, Mexico, France, Costa Rica, Turkey and Iran, before settling in Canada. All those cultures and more have been poured into this spicy, vivacious, kinetic and very entertaining fiction. -- Sean Thomas

Review:

"Yann Martel is a vivid and entrancing story-teller." (Sunday Telegraph)

"An inventive, shocking and ultimately uplifting story." (Daily Mail)

"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)

"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)

"Here is a writer with a talent as fabulous as the tale that he - and his Pi - have to tell." (Spectator)

• Publisher: Canongate
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1841958492
• ISBN 13: 9781841958491
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336
• Illustrator: Tomislav Torjanac