Tiger
By (Author) Polly Clark
Quercus Publishing
riverrun
2nd May 2019
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
823.92
Paperback
432
Width 153mm, Height 239mm, Spine 32mm
544g
The breathtaking new novel from the prize-winning author of LARCHFIELD ('Gripping' Margaret Atwood - 'Captivating' Louis de Bernieres - 'Magical and transcendent' John Boyne)
Set across two continents, TIGER is a sweeping story of survival and redeeming love that plunges the reader into one of the world's last wildernesses with blistering authenticity. Frieda is a primatologist, sensitive and solitary, until a violent attack shatters her ordered world. In her new role as a zookeeper, she confronts a very different ward: an injured wild tiger.Deep in the Siberian taiga, Tomas, a Russian conservationist, fears that the natural order has toppled. The king tiger has been killed by poachers and a spectacular tigress now patrols his vast territory as her own.In a winter of treacherous competition, the path of the tigress and her cub crosses with an Udeghe huntress and her daughter. Vengeance must follow, and the fates of both tigers and people are transformed.Learning of her tiger's past offers Frieda the chance of freedom. Faced with the savage forces of nature, she must trust to her instinct and, like the tiger, find a way to live in the world.Fierce, elegant and compelling as the tiger itself, this is less a novel than the very force of nature caught in fiction. Grabbed me by the imagination and carried me into the wilds of animal and human nature. - Laline Paull, author of The Bees
Visceral . . . exotic . . . An impassioned celebration of second chances - Daily MailUnsettling, immersive . . . A startling, gore-splattered, nerve-racking exploration of how human and animal territories - both physical and psychic - collide . . . Combining the propulsiveness of a thriller with the raw yet meditative tone of a memoir, Clark writes with a poet's ear and a naturalist's eye, and has a deep grasp of the profound contract between indigenous peoples and the beasts they revere. She never loses sight of the endangered creature that forms the beating heart of a passionate, remarkable and uplifting novel. - GuardianElectrifying - one to watch - BooksellerA gorgeously written and unique novel that plunges the reader right into a vividly described natural world - Good HousekeepingA captivating walk on the wild side - HeatPolly Clark was born in Toronto and divides her time between Helensburgh on Scotland's west coast and a houseboat in London. Her poetry collections have between them won the Eric Gregory Award and been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and the Michael Marks Awards. Her first novel Larchfield won the MsLexia Novel Prize and was published in 2017 to critical acclaim. She has worked as a zookeeper at Edinburgh Zoo, where her fascination with Siberian tigers began. For Tiger she undertook a research trip to the remote Russian taiga, where, in the depths of the Siberian winter, at temperatures of -35C, she learned how to track wild tigers.