The appearance of a young storyteller with a unique fictional voice is cause for celebration. Yann Martel's title story (described as "unforgettable...a truly stunning piece of fiction"*), won the 1991 Journey Prize to universal acclaim. The intensely human tragedy that lies at its heart is told with a spare, careful elegance that resonates long after it has ended--and is matched through all the stories by an immediacy an dazzling freshness.

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"Yann Martel's new, strong voice weaves together our smallest anxieties and memories with the sentences and executions passed upon all of us by war, crime, and life. AIDS is blended into the lunacy of history. Violins into the Vietnam war. Variations on a warden's letter to the mother of a son he has just hanged are laid out as in a manual of etiquette. Martel has that rare talent of making fiction true and thus painful yet compelling." --John Ralston Saul

"Many of Yann Martel's stories have fantastical curves...turns of magical possibility that evoke Calvino or Borges." --Kingston Whig Standard*

"Those who would believe that the art of fiction is moribund--let them read Yann Martel with astonishment, delight and gratitude." --Alberta Manguel

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Yann Martel was born in Spain in 1963 of peripatetic Canadian parents. He grew up in Alaska, British Columbia, Costa Rica, France, Ontario and Mexico, and has continued travelling as an adult, spending time in Iran, Turkey and India. After studying philosophy at Trent University and while doing various odd jobs—tree planting, dishwashing, working as a security guard—he began to write. He is the prize-winning author of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, a collection of short stories, and of Self, a novel, both of them published internationally. He has been living from his writing since the age of 27. He divides his time between yoga, writing and volunteering in a palliative care unit. Yann Martel lives in Montreal.

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