Elephant by Paul Pickering

Elephant by Paul Pickering

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.

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 themAn 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 émigrés, ‘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

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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781784632250
ISBN 10	1784632252
Title	Elephant
Author	Paul Pickering
Series	Salt Modern Fiction
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Salt Publishing
Year published	2021-07-30
Number of pages	400
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.