The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy

The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy

A thrilling journey into the minds of African elephants as they struggle to survive.

If, as many recent nonfiction best sellers have revealed, animals possess emotions and awareness, they must also have stories. In The White Bone, a novel imagined entirely from the perspective of African elephants, Barbara Gowdy creates a world whole and separate that yet illuminates our own.

For years, young Mud and her family have roamed the high grasses, swamps, and deserts of the sub-Sahara. Now the earth is scorched by drought, and the mutilated bodies of family and friends lie scattered on the ground, shot down by ivory hunters. Nothing - not the once familiar terrain, or the age-old rhythms of life, or even memory itself - seems reliable anymore. Yet a slim prophecy of hope is passed on from water hole to water hole: the sacred white bone of legend will point the elephants toward the Safe Place. And so begins a quest through Africa's vast and perilous plains - until at last the survivors face a decisive trial of loyalty and courage.

In The White Bone, Barbara Gowdy performs a feat of imagination virtually unparalleled in modern fiction. Plunged into an alien landscape, we orient ourselves in elephant time, elephant space, elephant consciousness, and begin to feel, as Gowdy puts it, what it would be like to be that big and gentle, to be that imperiled, and to have that prodigious memory.

Gowdy, Barbara: - Barbara Gowdy's critically acclaimed six novels and widely anthologized short stories have been published in twenty-four countries and have appeared on best-seller lists throughout the world. She has been a finalist three times for the Governor General's Award and the Roger's Trust Fiction Prize, twice for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. She is a Trillium Book Award winner, a Member of the Order of Canada, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Ben Marcus, Harper's Magazine, named her as one of the few terrific literary realists who have pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and story-telling methods.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780006474890
ISBN 10	0006474896
Title	The White Bone
Author	Barbara Gowdy
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Harper Perennial
Year published	2007-03-13
Number of pages	368
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.