THE WHITE BONE

Product Description A classic, moving quest of elephants, memory and the will to survive. Mud is an infant elephant, orphaned at birth and blessed with visionary powers. She and her adoptive family roam the plains of east Africa in search of water and food. At a crowded watering hole in a bad drought, ivory poachers find them and kill, or drive off, almost all of the elephant cows and their young. Mud, now an adolescent and pregnant with her first calf, sets out with the wounded and traumatized survivors in search of the injured. Guided by visions, memories and hallucinations as much as their incredible sense of smell, the ruined herd hears rumours of A Safe Place and the White Bone that can lead them there. The quest becomes one of endurance, sacrifice and, ultimately, transcendence, as the elephants struggle for their own lives and the continuation of their kind. Strikingly original, The White Bone takes Gowdy's talent for inspired characterization to new heights, allowing us to see the world afresh through the eyes of a constantly persecuted, and yet infinitely gentle species. Review ‘The White Bone dramatises its creatures with what is both affection and a kind of mournful desperation. This is, afterall, a story of a species hunted nearly to its end. What saves it from archness is a vein of stunning and melancholy lyricism married to brutality. Images in Gowdy’s fiction sear themselves, moving or terrible, maddeningly unforgettable, onto the reader’s brain.’Scotsman ‘Inspired imagination and research have created a marvel of a book. In The White Bone, the language, social structure, intellectual and spritiual world of elephants are as real as the fabric of human life. Absolutely compelling.’Alice Munro About the Author Barbara Gowdy lives in Toronto. She is the author of four previous works of fiction: ‘Through the Green Valley’, ‘We So Seldom Look on Love’, ‘Falling Angels’ and ‘Mister Sandman’.