Beatrice and Virgil
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Yann Martel
Penguin India
205 pages, Rs 450
“Eventually the business of personally promoting his novel died down, and Henry returned to an existence where he could sit quietly in a room for weeks and months on end. He wrote another book.”
The book that Henry writes concerns the Holocaust. In the process of writing it, he finds a letter from an elderly taxidermist on his doormat which poses a puzzle that he cannot resist. As he is pulled into the world of this strange and calculating man, Henry becomes increasingly involved with the lives of a donkey and a howler monkey—named Beatrice and Virgil—the taxidermist’s ‘guides through hell.’
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