The original, unforgettable and thought-provoking new novel by award-winning author Chris Flynn that will change how readers understand the world. Narrated by a 13,000-year-old extinct mammoth, this is the (mostly) true story of how a collection of prehistoric creatures came to be on sale at a natural history auction in New York in 2007. By tracing how and when these fossils were unearthed, Mammoth leads us on a funny and fascinating journey from the Pleistocene epoch to nineteenth-century America and beyond, revealing how ideas about science and religion have shaped our world. With our planet on the brink of calamitous climate change, Mammoth scrutinises humanity's role in the destruction of the natural world while also offering a message of hope.
"'Chris Flynn has written a brilliant, hilarious, and curiously moving novel, featuring one of the best narrators in literary history and - without a doubt - the single best narrator in natural history. Why has nobody ever written a novel from the point of view of a mammoth's skeleton before? Because nobody was ever smart enough to do it. I simply love this story.'"
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls, The Signature of All Things and Eat, Pray, Lov
"'Mammoth is astonishing, a novel that is by turns playful, uncomfortably excoriating, very funny and always deeply humane. The voice in Mammoth doesn't sound like a voice I've ever heard before and for those of us who love books and reading this is the pleasure and the hope that we are always chasing. This novel delivers. It is both a requiem for lost worlds and lost time, and it is also a sheer joy.'"
Christos Tsiolkas, author of Damascus, The Slap and Barracuda
"'Mammoth is an extraordinary gambit of the storytelling imagination of Chris Flynn, and a new way of listening to all the narratives of what we have supplanted. Mammoth is playful and serious, encapsulating the macro-history of all life in the tale of one species. I don't think anyone else has quite done that.'"
Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's Ark and Gossip from the Forest
