The White Bone (40 page)

–The Seattle Times

“Engrossing… . Touching… . A captivating fictional venture.”

–People

“Gowdy [has a] great gift for sensual description… . The novel is plenty funny and plenty odd.”

–The New York Times Book Review

“With
The White Bone
… Barbara Gowdy has produced a classic quest story that is also a technical feat… . A surprisingly moving, high-stakes work of imagination.”

–Elle

“Brilliant… . Gowdy’s elephants are astonishingly
embodied,
their world made up of vivid sensory particulars and depicted with precise naturalistic realism… . The pathos of their condition, its recognizability, is, in the end, the book’s most lasting effect.”

–The Boston Book Review

“Compelling… .
The White Bone
takes place in a self-sufficient and brilliantly authentic world… . Impressive and delightful.”

–Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Gowdy brilliantly imbues these uncommon characters with wrenching emotions.”

–The Village Voice Literary Supplement

“The White Bone
is a brilliant precursor of the novel of the future–a realization of noble and tragic lives not our own. This sorrowful novel does holy work because it engages us in the holiest of acts–empathy.”

–Joy Williams

“This is a beautiful and heartbreaking book… . Momentous… . Mesmerizing. The writing throughout the book is rich and poetic, evoking the stark beauty of the African plains and the mythic dream-world of the elephants.”

–The Arizona Daily Star

“The White Bone
combines scrupulous research with fictional license to help the reader understand from the inside what it means to be an animal under attack… .
The White Bone
has the capacity to arouse not only outrage at human cruelty, but also wonder at the revolutionary power of language to up-end preconceptions.”

–L.A. Weekly

“[Gowdy] has imagined what it is like to be an endangered African elephant. The result is a tender, tragic, majestic triumph… . Anyone who believes that animals are sentient beings will be moved and fascinated by Gowdy’s deeply imagined novel.”

–The Hartford Courant

“Gowdy has accomplished the unlikely feat of unfurling a fascinating drama completely from the perspective of a community of African elephants.”

–New York Magazine

“From the enormously gifted Gowdy [comes] a mesmerizing journey into the heart of Africa… . Warmly conveying a remarkably full vision of elephant life, as well as the almost incomprehensible tragedy of species annihilation, Gowdy has created an astonishingly moving saga.”

–Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“The mysticism and majesty of the African elephant loses no honor in Gowdy’s new novel… . [A] masterfully crafted novel.”

–Library Journal
(starred review)

m“A richly detailed novel.”

–New York Daily News

The White Bone
Copyright © 1998 by Barbara Gowdy.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40079-4

Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

First published in hardcover by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd: 1998
First paperback edition: 1999
First Harper Perennial Canada paperback edition: 2003

This Harper Perennial Modern Classics trade paperback edition: 2010

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

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www.harpercollins.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Gowdy, Barbara
The white bone : a novel / Barbara Gowdy.

ISBN 978-1-55468-524-0

1. Elephants–Fiction. I. Title.

PS8563.O883W5 2009     C813’.54     C2009-905758-1

RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1