Life of Pi
Awards & Recognition
Winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction
The International # 1 Bestseller
Winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award for Best New Fiction of 2002
Shortlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award
Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2002 (Best Book, Canada-Carib Region)
Shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction
Winner of the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
A Quill & Quire Best Book of 2001
A Poets & Writers Magazine Best Book of Fiction for 2002
A CBC Canada Reads 2003 Selection
Shortlisted for the Borders Original Voices Award for Fiction, 2003
Shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing
Shortlisted for the Spoken Word Award for Abridged Modern Fiction and the Spoken Word Award for Best Abridgment
Shortlisted for a Torgi Award
Winner of the Scene It Read It prize of the Coventry Inspiration Book Awards
A 2003 Selection of the One Book Arizona Program
A 2003 Selection of the One Book Santa Barbara Program
Winner of The Boeke Prize (South Africa)
Winner of the Deutschen Bücherpreis 2004
Winner of the La Presse Prix du Grand Public
Finalist for the 2004 Book Sense Book of the Year Award – Paperback
Inaugural Pick of the AOL Red Book Club
A Top 25 “Best of the Best” Book Sense Selection
Selected for Esquire’s list of the Top Ten Books of 2003
61 Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List
Rights Sold
Audio (abridged UK): HarperCollins
Audio (abridged/unabridged World English): HighBridge
Arabic: Al-Kamel Verlag
Azerbaijan: Alatoran
Bengali: Sandesh
Brazil: Rocco
Bulgaria: Prozoretz
Canada: Knopf
Catalan: Columna
China: Crown (Complex)
China: Yilin (Simplified)
Croatia: Znanje
Czech: Argo
Czech: Czech National Radio (Radio)
Denmark: Borgens
Denmark: Den Grimme Aelling (Audio)
Estonia: Pegasus
Film: Fox 2000
Finland: Tammi
France: DeNoel
Fr. Canada: XYZ Editeur
Germany: Fischer
Greece: Psichogios
Hindi: Penguin India
Holland: Prometheus
Hungary: Europa
Iceland: Bjartur
India: Penguin
Indonesia: Gramedia
Israel: Kinneret
Italy: Piemme
Japan: Take Shobo
Korea: Jakkajungsin
Latvia: Atena
Lithuania: Jotema
Marathi: Penguin India
Malayalam: DC Books
Norway: Dinamo
Norway: Lydbokforlaget (Audio)
Poland: Znak
Poland: QES Agency (Audio)
Portugal: Difel
Romania: Editura Polirom
Russia: Exmo
Russia: Soyuz (Audio)
Serbia: Alfa
Slovakia: Ikar
Slovenia: Mladinska (+Audio)
Spain: Destino
Sri Lanka: Sarasavi
Sweden: Brombergs
Sweden: Bonnier (Audio)
Thailand: Image
Turkey: Inkilap
UK: Canongate
US: Harcourt Brace
Life of Pi
Critical Acclaim for
“Life of Pi could renew your faith in the ability of novelists to invest even the most outrageous scenario with plausible life. . . . Although the book reverberates with echoes from sources as disparate at Robinson Crusoe and Aesop’s fables, the work it most strongly recalls is Ernest Hemingway’s own foray into existentialist parable, The Old Man and the Sea.”
–The New York Times Book Review
“An impassioned defense of zoos, a death-defying trans-Pacific sea adventure a la Kon-Tiki, and a hilarious shaggy-dog story . . . : This audacious novel manages to be all of these.”
–The New Yorker
“A fabulous romp through an imagination by turns ecstatic, cunning, despairing and resilient …. Martel displays the clever voice and tremendous storytelling skills of an emerging master.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“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
“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
“You’ve read this, right? A kid named Piscine Patel (Pi) is cast adrift in an open boat with an acquaintance, Richard Parker, after Pi’s ship sinks in the middle of the ocean. Pi and Richard Parker survive in the open boat for a very long time. Oh, and Richard Parker happens to be a Bengal tiger. You’ve read it, right? No? Oh, God, hurry up. Life of Pi is wonderful.”
–Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly
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“…Compelling storytelling…”
–The Independent (UK)
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“A riotous imaginative excursion…”
–New Statesman
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“…Mesmeric, dreamlike…”
–New Internationalist
"Read the book before seeing the movie. As splendid as the cinematography is, the images and themes the novel conjures are richer still."
–David Baldacci (on The Today Show)
“FIFTY-SEVEN WEEKS ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST and the winner of the Man Booker Prize, this allegory about a boy, a lifeboat and a Bengal tiger is captivatingly beautiful. Books don’t get much better than this.”
–Mt. Lebanon Magazine (Pittsburgh)
“Already a bestseller in Canada. Think: comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes” on a lifeboat with an overt religious theme.”
–Wall Street Journal (Editor’s Pick)
“By the time Martel throws Pi out to sea, his quirkily magical and often hilarious vision has already taken hold. . . . Beautifully fantastical and spirited.”
–Salon
“Fantastic in nearly every sense of the word, Life of Pi is a gripping adventure story, a parable about the place of human beings in the universe and a tantalizing work of metafiction. . . . Laced with wit, spiced with terror, it’s a book by an extraordinary talent.”
–St. Paul Pioneer-Press
“There’s a lot to be said for a writer who takes as many chances and aims as high as Montreal’s Yann Martel.”
–The Toronto Star
“For most of my adult life, I haven’t had a lot of time to reread books, no matter how much I loved them. My days were scheduled down to the minute in the White House, but even before then, I was balancing a demanding career with two little girls and a husband who was often traveling back and forth to Washington, D.C., or the Illinois State Capitol. So, with limited reading time, I preferred to read new books.
But even with all of that said, yes, there are a few books that I’ve read more than once. When my daughters were younger, I tagged along with some of the books they’d been reading in class. For instance, I’ve now read Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” three times. I reread “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Life of Pi” with the girls, too. Now that they’re older, we do less of it, but it was nice for a while to have a little Obama family book club.”
–Michelle Obama, By the Book in the New York Times
“Yann Martel’s third work of fiction, Life of Pi, is a terrific book. It’s fresh, original, smart, devious, and crammed with absorbing lore. . . Life of Pi is not just a readable and engaging novel, it’s a finely twisted length of yarn. . . Like its noteworthy ancestors, among which I take to be Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, the Ancient Mariner, Moby Dick and Pincher Martin, it’s a tale of disaster at sea coupled with miraculous survival - a boys’ adventure for grownups.”
–Margaret Atwood, Sunday Times UK
“It is a story so magical, so playful, so harrowing and astonishing that it will make you believe imagination might be the first step (to believing in God). . . Every page offers something of tension, humanity, surprise, or even ecstasy.”
–Glynn Brow, The Times (UK)
“Life of Pi is a hilarious novel, full of clever tricks, amusing asides and grand originality. Its subtext exists in that delightful area between the possible and the fantastical, and its tome reminded me of Italo Calvin’s Our Ancestors. As to whether it makes you believe in God - well miracles can happen, so why not to you?”
–Daily Telegraph (UK)
“Absurd, macabre, unreliable and sad, deeply sensual in its evoking of smells and sights, the whole trip and the narrator’s insanely curious voice (which evokes and intellectual humming-bird compelled to sip deep from every possible blossom) suggests Joseph Conrad and Salman Rushdie hallucinating together over the meaning of The Old Man and the Sea and Gulliver’s Travels.”
–The Financial Times (UK)
“In its subject and its style, this enormously lovable novel is suffused with wonder: a willed innocence that produces a fresh, sideways look at our habitual assumptions, about religious divisions, or zoos versus the wild, or the possibility of freedom. As Martel promises in his author’s note, this is fiction probing the imaginative realm with scientific exactitude, twisting reality to “bring out its essence”.
–Justine Jordan, The Guardian (UK)
“Life of Pi is black magic and reality, a subtle and sophisticated fable about belief in its many guises. . . Booker judges capable of appreciating an imagination in full flight need look no further.”
–Irish Times
“Martel has an agile, quirky imagination … and the whole thing is done with great charm, as Pi digresses on all manner of subjects from three-toed sloths to religion … triumphs as a really remarkable feat of tale-telling.”
–Sunday Times
“Luminously written . . . [It] has the excitement that is one of the things we read fiction for: not for comedies of manners alone, but for an evocation of the unfamiliar or the barely imaginable.”
–Times Literary Supplement
“If Pi is a tamer of tigers, then Martel is a tamer of reality. That he manages to tell this ambitious, demanding tale in such a way that the novel requires only the slightest suspension of disbelief is remarkable. He captures the terror, the loneliness, the gore and the madness. He then rewards the audience with just enough humour to keep them from turning away.”
–Montreal Mirror
“[Martel] demonstrates the immense power of the imagination to transform our view with the light twitch of a tiger’s tail and slyly suggests that even now a Royal Bengal Tiger by the name of Richard Parker could be roaming wild through certain parts of Mexico.”
–India Today
“Vladimir Nabokov wrote: ‘Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.’ There is no wolf in Yann Martel’s latest novel, Life of Pi, but there is a young boy, and a Bengal tiger, and throughout this story – a story, we are told, that would make us believe in God – we are asked to accept the incredible, the impossible, to trust that we are not being deceived; we are asked to have faith and, as in all good literature, our faith is rewarded. … Ever aware of clichés, and using them to his advantage, Pi is Martel’s triumph. He is understated and ironic, utterly believable and pure. He is also in love with God and has decided to become a practising Christian, Hindu and Muslim. … The whole fantastic voyage carries hints of The Old Man and the Sea and the magic realism of Amado and Marquez and the absurdity of Beckett. … Yann Martel does a beautiful job of crying wolf.”
–The Globe and Mail
“A WORK OF RARE BRILLIANCE … It is, without question, one of Canada’s supreme achievements in modern literature. … [Martel] has proved to be Canada’s most seductively imaginative voice. … The book is a pleasure not only for the subtleties of its philosophy but also for its ingenious and surprising story. Martel is a confident, heartfelt artist and his imagination is cared for in a writing style that is both unmistakably and marvelously reserved. The ending to Life of Pi, I’ve got to add, is a show of such sophisticated genius that I could scarcely keep my eyes in my head as I read it.”
–Vancouver Sun
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“If this century produces a classic work of survival literature, Martel is surely a contender.”
–The Nation
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“The perfect novel to whisk readers far away from reality.”
–USA Today
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“Life of Pi may not make you believe in God. But it will make you believe in literature.”
–San Diego Union-Tribune
“A bit of seafaring, more than a hint of magical realism, and a wallop of sheer storytelling genius characterize Martel’s novel.”
–New Jersey Star-Ledger
“An artful and elegant exploration of the stories human beings tell themselves in order to make sense of the cosmos. … A marvelous feat of imagination and inquiry. Yann Martel has earned his stripes as a novelist of grand ideas and sports them here as surely as Richard Parker, the majestic Bengal tiger, wears his own black and orange skin.”
–Ottawa X Press
“Martel displays an impressive knowledge of language, history, religion and literature, and his writing is filled with insight.”
–London Free Press
“A work of wonder. . . . Martel is a limpid stylist with a flair for the poetic. Mainly, however, he’s a storyteller – and a brilliant one.”
–Book
“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. It’s an allegory about faith and the value of religious metaphor - not just for the converted, but for all of us.”
–Michel Faber, Scotland on Sunday
“Those who would believe that the art of fiction is moribund – let them read Yann Martel with astonishment, delight and gratitude.”
–Alberto Manguel
“…should the Observer ever update its list [of the hundred greatest novels of all time], a twenty-first-century novel in the Quixote mode might just make the cut. It unfolds an outlandish yarn about a boy trapped in a lifeboat with a tiger, and promises to tell a story that will make readers believe in God. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi … has been lauded for its originality. The book’s zeitgeist plea for tolerance, especially its blending of three great faiths – Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam – in the character of Pi Patel, has also been a natural focus of attention. Novels rarely succeed in conveying timeless truths and capturing the news of the day.
Less often remarked is that Life of Pi has an old soul. Daniel Defoe would have cheered the boy’s adventures at sea. Jonathan Swift might have nodded approval at the flesh-eating island where Pi nearly meets a grisly end. Laurence Sterne could have offered cock-and-bull advice to Martel about his narrative strategy of demanding we accept the ever taller tales he presents, by way of literally proving the novel’s contention that humans believe in God because it is, in effect, the better story.
And Cervantes? He’d have appreciated the conflicting explanations for what happened to Pi during those months adrift on the ocean, and Martel’s decision to leave the choice up to us.”
– Charles Foran, The Walrus
“I guarantee that you will not put this book down. It is a realistic, gripping story of survival at sea. Every detail is here … you almost believe you could do it yourself after reading this account. … On one level the book is a suspenseful adventure story, a demonstration of how extreme need alters a man’s character. … On another level, this is a profound meditation on the role of religion in human life and the nature of animals, wild and human. … [Martel’s] imagination is powerful, his range enormous, his capacity for persuasion almost limitless. I predict that Yann Martel will develop into one of Canada’s great writers.”
–Hamilton Spectator
“Life of Pi has a buoyant, exotic insistence reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe’s most Gothic fiction, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Oddities abound and the storytelling is first-rate.”
–Edmonton Journal
“Ceaselessly clever … artful, occasionally hilarious … nicely unpredictable. … It is to Martel’s credit that he handles religion without even the remote clang of moral hammer hitting. One never knows where the novel’s author’s own belief lies, and that suggests deftly executed artistic impartiality. In the end, Life of Pi may not, as its teller promises, persuade readers to believe in God, but it makes a fine argument for the divinity of good art.”
–Montreal Gazette
“If Yann Martel’s new novel, Life of Pi, were to land on you like one of the fall’s first, fresh snowflakes, the first thing you’d notice is that the story has a very unusual shape. … Martel’s writing is so original … Martel as a writer is all about curiosity. … In Life of Pi one gleans that faith – one of the most ephemeral emotions, yet crucial whenever life is on the line – is rooted in the will to live. … And even if this book doesn’t make you believe in God, you come to believe in a really good writer, him.”
–National Post
“Life of Pi is about many things – religion, zoology, fear – but most of all, it’s about sheer tenacity. En route to Canada, a cargo ship carrying a family of Indian zookeepers sinks. Sixteen-year-old Pi is stranded alone in a lifeboat with a tiger. Soon, he finds himself doing things completely out of character: gleefully snapping a seabird’s neck, relishing sea turtle blood (he’s a vegetarian) and peeing on a tarpaulin to convince the tiger there is a new alpha male on board. Martel has created a funny, wise and highly original look at what it means to be human.”
–Chatelaine