Elephant

Paul Pickering is the author of seven novels: Wild About Harry, Perfect English, The Blue Gate of Babylon, Charlie Peace, The Leopard’s Wife, Over the Rainbow and Elephant. The Blue Gate of Babylon was a New York Times notable book of the year, who dubbed it ‘superior literature’. Often compared to Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Pickering was chosen as one of the top ten young British novelists by bookseller WHSmith and has been long-listed for the Booker Prize three times. The novelist J. G. Ballard said Pickering’s work is ‘truly subversive’. As well as short stories and poetry, he has written several plays, film scripts and columns for The Times and Sunday Times.

What Elephant provides to the reader is a gloriously absorbing story about storytelling, as rich in suspense and vitality as it is in incidents and images that dare you to disbelieve them. An ice-bound Russian lake is filled with the frozen bodies of neatly dressed office girls. A zeppelin appears above Wentworth Woodhouse, equipped with a harnessed undercarriage that can carry a full-grown Indian elephant away from imminent danger.