Yann Martel to publish first novel since Life of Pi

Canadian winner of the Man Booker Prize to publish third novel

27 July 2009

Yann Martel will publish his third novel in 2010, his first after the Man Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi. Life of Pi won the Man Booker Prize in 2002 and went on to be an international bestseller.

Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House US, bought the rights to publish the novel, as yet untitled, in the United States. British rights were sold to Canongate and Canadian rights to Alfred A. Knopf, as well as rights to publishers in Australia, New Zealand and Germany.

Cindy Spiegel, publisher of Spiegel & Grau, told the New York Times that when she read the manuscript she ‘had the feeling of reading a classic.'

‘It feels like you are reading Beckett or Nabokov now,' she continued. ‘It's a book that addresses a topic that's been written about many, many times but feels profoundly original.'

Martel's Toronto agent Jackie Kaiser told Canada's Globe and Mail that the book is ‘a story of an encounter between a writer and a taxidermist, and is both a metaphorical take on the Holocaust and an examination of our complicated relationship to animals.'

In an interview with the New York Times, Martel went on to say ‘I've noticed over the years of reading books on the Holocaust and seeing movies that it's always represented in the same way, which is historical or social realism. I was thinking that it was interesting that you don't have many imaginative takes on it like George Orwell's ‘Animal Farm' and its take on Stalinism.'

The new novel is scheduled to be published internationally some time in 2010.

The Man Booker Prize Fiction at its finest