Yann Martel

Yann Martel's imaginative and unforgettable Life of Pi is a magical reading experience, an endless blue expanse of storytelling about adventure, survival, and ultimately, faith. The precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry, India, where he tries on various faiths for size, attracting "religions the way a dog attracts fleas." Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker ("His head was the size and color of the lifebuoy, with teeth"). It sounds like a colorful setup, but these wild beasts don't burst into song as if co-starring in an anthropomorphized Disney feature. After much gore and infighting, Pi and Richard Parker remain the boat's sole passengers, drifting for 227 days through shark-infested waters while fighting hunger, the elements, and an overactive imagination. In rich, hallucinatory passages, Pi recounts the harrowing journey as the days blur together, elegantly cataloging the endless passage of time and his struggles to survive: "It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none the champion." The protagonist Piscine "Pi" Molitor Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry, explores the issues of religion and spirituality from an early age and survives 227 days shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean.

In Lisbon in 1904, a young man named Tomás discovers an old journal. It hints at the existence of an extraordinary artifact that—if he can find it—would redefine history. Traveling in one of Europe’s earliest automobiles, he sets out in search of this strange treasure.Thirty-five years later, a Portuguese pathologist devoted to the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie finds himself at the center of a mystery of his own and drawn into the consequences of Tomás’s quest.Fifty years on, a Canadian senator takes refuge in his ancestral village in northern Portugal, grieving the loss of his beloved wife. But he arrives with an unusual companion: a chimpanzee. And there the century-old quest will come to an unexpected conclusion.The High Mountains of Portugal—part quest, part ghost story, part contemporary fable—offers a haunting exploration of great love and great loss. Filled with tenderness, humor, and endless surprise, it takes the reader on a road trip through Portugal in the last century—and through the human soul.

This is the story of a donkey named Beatrice and a monkey named Virgil. It is also the story of an extraordinary journey undertaken by a man named Henry. It begins with a mysterious parcel, and it ends in a place that will make you think again about one of the most significant events of the twentieth century. Once you have finished reading it, it is impossible to forget.

Here is a remarkable collection from the author of Life of Pi. In "The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios," two young friends discover the transformative power of the imagination as they join together to craft a story about a Finnish family of Italian extraction whome they name the Roccamatios—Rok-kah-MAH-tee-ohs. This unforgettable novella and three other moving and thought-provoking stories display the startling mix of dazzle and depth that has made Yann Martel an international phenomenon.

“I know you’re very busy, Mr. Harper. We’re all busy. But every person has a space next to where they sleep, whether a patch of pavement or a fine bedside table. In that space, at night, a book can glow. And in those moments of docile wakefulness, when we begin to let go of the day, then is the perfect time to pick up a book and be someone else, somewhere else, for a few minutes, a few pages, before we fall asleep.”From the author of Life of Pi comes a literary correspondence — recommendations to Canada’s Prime Minister of great short books that will inspire and delight book lovers and book club readers across our nation.Every two weeks since April 16th, 2007, Yann Martel has mailed Stephen Harper a book along with a letter. These insightful, provocative letters detailing what he hopes the Prime Minister may take from the books — by such writers as Jane Austen, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Stephen Galloway — are collected here together. The one-sided correspondence (Mr. Harper’s office has only replied once) becomes a meditation on reading and writing and the necessity to allow ourselves to expand stillness in our lives, even if we’re not head of government.

Dystopian short story.

From the mailbox of the Prime Minister's Office to your bookshelf, a list of more than 100 books that every Canadian should read. This largely one-sided correspondence from the "loneliest book club in the world" is a compendium for bibliophiles and those who follow the Canadian political scene. Smart, subversive, signed, sealed, and now available to you...even if your address is not 80 Wellington Street.

A story about a man, a war-torn country and a trip into a septic tank.

From the author of the international bestseller Life of Pi, a brilliant retelling of the Trojan War from two commoners: an ancient soldier and a modern scholar.Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were not the only ancient tales of the Trojan War. In Son of Nobody, Yann Martel composes a new the Psoad, an epic in free verse that follows a goatherd’s son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight at Troy. Psoas meets his doom and the poem of his life is lost—until a Canadian academic studying at Oxford, Harlow Donne, discovers its relics thirty centuries later. As Harlow assembles and comments on the fragments in footnotes, he retrieves memories of his wife and daughter and grapples with questions of ambition, family, and responsibility in both the ancient and modern worlds. Son of Nobody upends the regal perspective of traditional epics and shows that “the past is never done with, that always there are parallels and returns and repetitions, always the song continues.” Readers of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles and Emily Wilson’s The Iliad will revel in this breathtaking feat of the imagination.

Eksperymentalna powieść hybryda, nawiązująca do książki "Orlando" Virginii Wolf i jej znakomitej ekranizacji z Tildą Swinton w roli tytułowej.Yann Martell dokonuje próby opisania „ja” totalnego i jednocześnie uniwersalnego, wyzwolonego z płci. Bohater nie ma imienia – ani jako chłopiec, ani jako dziewczyna. Jest połączeniem obojga, przy czym ważniejsze jest „ja” kobiece – pełniejsze i bardziej zróżnicowane wewnętrznie (i zewnętrznie).Bohater, jak sam Martel, rodzi się w 1963 roku, jest francuskojęzycznym Kanadyjczykiem i szczęśliwe dzieciństwo spędza w podróżach z ukochanymi rodzicami – dyplomatami. Mocnych chłopięcych doznań dostarcza mu szkoła z internatem, gdzie nie tylko poznał, czym jest przemoc i dominacja, ale też zgłębił potrzeby i zakamarki swojego ciała. W szkole dowiaduje się, że został sierotą. Jest teraz człowiekiem znikąd, bezdomnym, na szczęście solidnie zabezpieczonym finansowo. Ma też podwójną, dwujęzyczną, angielsko-francuską tożsamość. Kiedy pewnego dnia budzi się jako kobieta, myśli już po angielsku. Studiuje, podróżuje, przeżywa romanse, zaczyna pisać. I wreszcie spotyka swą drugą połówkę. Doświadczenie kobiecości zaczyna zbliżać się do pełni. Szczęście jednak jest złudne...

Yann Martel’s astonishing novel begins with a successful writer attempting to publish his latest book, made up of a novel and an essay. Henry plans for it to be a “flip book” that the reader can start at either end, reading the novel or the essay first, because both pieces are equally concerned with representations of the Holocaust. Faced with severe and categorical rejection, Henry gives up hope. He abandons writing, moves with his wife to a foreign city, joins a community theatre, becomes a waiter in a chocolatería. But then he receives a package containing a scene from a play, photocopies from a short story by Flaubert—about a man who hunts animals down relentlessly—and a short “I need your help.”Intrigued, Henry tracks down his correspondent, and finds himself in a strange part of the city, walking past a stuffed okapi into a taxidermist’s workshop. The taxidermist—also named Henry—says he has been working on his play, A 20th-Century Shirt, for most of his life, but now he needs Henry’s help to describe his the play’s protagonists are a stuffed donkey and a howler monkey named Beatrice and Virgil, respectively, and Henry’s successful book was in part about animals. And though his new acquaintance is austere, abrupt and almost unearthly, Henry the writer is drawn more and more deeply into Henry the taxidermist’s uncompromising world.Beatrice & Virgil gradually grows into something more, a shattering and ultimately transfixing work that asks searching questions about the nature of our understanding of history, the meaning of suffering and the value of art. As we are drawn deeper into their disturbing moral fable, the relationship between the two faltering writers named Henry becomes more and more complex until it can only be resolved in an explosive, unexpected catastrophe.

Grocery & Gourmet Food

As Altas Montanhas de Portugal leva-nos numa viagem pelo Portugal do século passado que é também uma viagem interior.Na Lisboa de 1904, um jovem chamado Tomás descobre um diário antigo onde é mencionado um artefacto extraordinário que poderá redefinir a história. Ao volante de um dos primeiros automóveis da Europa, Tomás aventura-se pelo país em busca deste objeto invulgar.Trinta e cinco anos depois, em Bragança, um patologista, leitor voraz dos romances de Agatha Christie, vê-se enredado num mistério que é consequência da demanda que Tomás levara a cabo.Décadas mais tarde, um senador canadiano refugia-se numa aldeia no Norte de Portugal após a morte da mulher. Com ele traz um companheiro um chimpanzé. E eis que é desvendado por fim um mistério com cem anos. As Altas Montanhas de Portugal é um romance original e empolgante que explora com mestria questões prementes da condição humana.

Lissabon, 1904: In einem Automobil begibt sich der junge Tomás auf eine abenteuerliche Expedition in die Hohen Berge Portugals. Ein tragikomischer Roadtrip beginnt, der ein unvermutetes Ende nimmt. Doch das ist erst der Anfang einer fantastischen Geschichte, die die einsame Gegend noch Jahrzehnte später umweht wie ein unauslöschlicher Zauber... Ein unglaubliches und doch absolut glaubhaftes Meisterwerk über das Leben, den Tod und die Liebe - voller Weisheit und Witz.

Kazhdyj spravljaetsja s bolju utraty po-svoemu. Kto-to nachinaet khodit zadom napered, kto-to — zapoem chitat Agatu Kristi, a kto-to zavodit neobychnogo druga. Tri sovershenno raznykh sudby skhodjatsja v misticheskom prostranstve — Vysokikh Gorakh Portugalii. Laureat Bukerovskoj premii Jann Martel dlja svoego novogo, blistatelnogo romana o vere i skorbi nashel garmonichnyj, polnyj lirizma stil. «Vysokie Gory Portugalii» v svoej fantazii i pronzitelnosti podnimajutsja do zaoblachnykh vysot.

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books began in 1996 with a simple to bring together the people who create books with the people who love to read them. The festival was an immediate success and has become the largest and most prestigious book festival in the country, attracting more than 130,000 book lovers each year.

Il naufragio di Piscine Molitor Patel, un ragazzo indiano chiamato da tutti Pi, e quattro insoliti compagni di viaggio - una zebra ferita, un orango, una iena e una tigre - si trasforma in un'avventura sospesa tra realtà e magia. La sfida del protagonista sarà la sopravvivenza nonostante la sete, la fame, gli squali e la furia del mare. Un libro unico, un po' romanzo d'avventura e un po' favola surreale dall'inattesa anima nera.