Beatrice and Virgil

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.’