Life of Pi

“Absurd, macabre, unreliable and sad, deeply sensual in its evoking of smells and sights, the whole trip and the narrator’s insanely curious voice suggests Joseph Conrad and Salman Rushdie hallucinating together over the meaning of The Old Man and the Sea and Gulliver’s Travels.” Financial Times

“Life of Pi is a great adventure story, the sort that comes along rarely and enters a select canon at once. This would be enough to justify its existence, but it is also rich in metaphysics, beautifully written, moving and funny.” Scotland on Sunday

“This is compelling storytelling, and Martel is always ready to reel in the reader with a well-turned phrase or tasty aside.” Independent

“Here is a writer with a talent as fabulous as the tale that he – and his Pi – have to tell.” Spectator

“An engrossing and beautifully written meditation on God, man and beast. This is a rare gem: a book that you want to immediately re-read.” The List

“Martel has large amounts of intellectual fun with this outrageous fable … It dramatises and articulates the possibilities of storytelling, which for this writer is a kind of extremist high-wire act.” Observer

“One encounters page after page of images and observations riveting in their precision and insight … A story to make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction and its human creators, and in the original power of storytellers like Martel.” Los Angeles Times Book Review

“[This] enormously loveable novel is suffused with wonder.”

Guardian

“Yann Martel is a vivid and entrancing storyteller.”

Sunday Telegraph

“Martel is dazzling.” Independent on Sunday

“A fabulous romp through an imagination by turns ecstatic, cunning, despairing and resilient, this novel is an impressive achievement … Martel displays the clever voice and tremendous storytelling skills of an emerging master.” Publishers Weekly

“Impressive enough to make you, as the old man said, believe in God … Martel has hit on a marvellous notion and revels in elaborating it.” Scotsman

“Life of Pi is a real adventure: brutal, tender, expressive, dramatic and disarmingly funny … It’s difficult to stop reading when the pages run out.” San Francisco Chronicle

“Martel’s witty and wise novel, with its echo of William Golding’s Pincher Martin, has a teasing plausibility about it that taps into our desire for extraordinary stories that just might be true.” Metro

“Life of Pi could well be the book of the year.” What’s On In London

“An impassioned defence of zoos, a death-defying trans-Pacific sea adventure à la Kon-Tiki, and a hilarious shaggy-dog story … This audacious novel manages to be all of these.” New Yorker

“Readers familiar with Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje and Carol Shields should learn to make room on the map of contemporary Canadian fiction for the formidable Yann Martel.” Chicago Tribune

“[Martel] demonstrates the immense power of the imagination to transform our view with the light twitch of a tiger’s tail.” India Today