Promotional Information

A delightful historical fable based on a true story about an Indian elephant, who, in obedience to the absurd caprice of a sixteenth-century monarch, travels from Lisbon to Vienna

About the Author

Jose Saramago is one of the most important international writers of the last hundred years. Born in Portugal in 1922, he was in his sixties when he came to prominence as a writer with the publication of Baltasar and Blimunda. A huge body of work followed, translated into more than forty languages, and in 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Saramago died in June 2010.

Reviews

It is extremely funny. Old Saramago writes with a masterfully light hand, and the humour is tender, a mockery so tempered by patience and pity that the sting is gone though the wit remains vital... a series of contained miracles of absurdity, quiet laughter rising out of a profound, resigned, affectionate wisdom
*Guardian*

José Saramango wrote his final book with great panache
*The Times*

Here is a book as serious as it is charming; amid its ironies runs a sustained pleas for the subversive workings of the imagination: "every elephant contains two elephants, one who learns what he's being taught and another who insists on ignoring it all". Thank goodness for that'
*Guardian*

A novel of wit, warmth and wonder
*Yann Martel*

Here he has seized the opportunity to turn an unlikely tale of a transalpine hike into something far larger even than its elephantine subject.
*Independent*