Tiger
SHORTLISTED FOR SCOTTISH BOOK OF THE YEAR
Set across two continents, Tiger is a sweeping story of survival and redeeming love that plunges the reader into one of the world’s last wildernesses with blistering authenticity.
Fierce, elegant and compelling as the tiger itself, this is less a novel than the very force of nature caught in fiction. Grabbed me by the imagination and carried me into the wilds of animal and human nature.
Laline Paull, author of The Bees and POD, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize:
Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, The IT Crowd and best selling memoir Tough Crowd
Mesmerising in its language, enviable in its ambition and exquisite in execution, Tiger plunges you into a strange and sensual world every time you open its pages, and Clark is as sure footed a guide as you could hope.
Liz Jensen, Guardian:
Polly Clark was already a prize-winning poet when she published her 2017 debut novel Larchfield. Its successor, the unsettling, immersive Tiger, joins a small vanguard of novels – including Laline Paull’s The Bees, Jeff Van der Meer’s Southern Reach Trilogy and Richard Powers’s tree epic The Overstory - which approach non-human life in diverting new ways…. Unsettling, immersive . . . A startling, gore-splattered, nerve-racking exploration of how human and animal territories - both physical and psychic - collide . . . Combining the propulsiveness of a thriller with the raw yet meditative tone of a memoir, Clark writes with a poet's ear and a naturalist's eye, and has a deep grasp of the profound contract between indigenous peoples and the beasts they revere. She never loses sight of the endangered creature that forms the beating heart of a passionate, remarkable and uplifting novel.
Allan Massie, Scotsman:
Clark's tigress is magnificent and terrifying . . . Clark's description of the snowbound wilderness is excellent . . . Clark shows us nature red in tooth and claw and human claws may be as sharp as a tiger's . . . Her evocation of the terrifying wastes of the taiga and the grim horrors of a Siberian winter represents a real and memorable achievement. The book will surely sell well; it deserves to do so.
Podcast including exclusive footage from my tiger tracking expedition to Siberia. Narrated and produced by Polly Clark © Polly Clark
