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From "a writer of remarkable gifts" [Washington Post Book World], "Borges with emotional weight" [Toronto Globe & Mail], comes a tale that is at once a fantastical historical mystery, a haunting love story, and a glimpse into the uncanny -- the quest for a long-lost book detailing the animals left off Noah's Ark.
Xeno Atlas grows up in the Bronx, his Sicilian grandmother's strange stories of animal spirits his only escape from the legacy of his mother's death and his stern father's long absences as a common seaman. Shunted off to an isolated boarding school, with his father's activities abroad and the source of his newfound wealth grown increasingly mysterious, Xeno turns his early fascination with animals into a personal obsession: his search for the Caravan Bestiary. This medieval text, lost for eight hundred years, supposedly details the animals not granted passage on the ark - griffons, sphinxes, hippogriffs, manticores -- the vanished remnants of a lost world sometimes glimpsed in the shadowy recesses of our own.
Xeno's quest takes him from the tenements of New York to the jungles of Vietnam
to the ancient libraries of Europe - but it is only by riddling out his own
family secrets that he can hope to find what he is looking for. A story of
panoramic scope and intellectual suspense, The Bestiary is ultimately a tale
of heartbreak and redemption.
Reviews & an Excerpt:
Kirkus Reviews
Christopher’s smart, entertaining fifth novel is a marvelous hybrid of intellectual quest and well-plotted adventure.
Xeno Atlas’s mother died at his birth; his seafaring father, usually absent, is frosty during rare visits. Xeno is reared in 1950s New York by his maternal grandmother, with help from an Albanian housekeeper. He finds a second home in the casual, crowded household of his friend, animal-obsessed Bruno Moretti, and develops a crush on Bruno’s younger sister Lena. When the grandmother dies, Xeno’s father exiles his 13-year-old son to boarding school in Maine. It’s there that the boy hears of the legendary Caravan Bestiary, “a compilation of all the animals lost in the Great Flood.” These are Noah’s rejects, marvelous, monstrous hybrids like the basilisk, chimera and phoenix; the nine-tailed fox, a trickster that can assume any human shape; the gullinbursti, a wild boar forged of gold. Long fascinated by his grandmother’s stories of mythical creatures (including a Sicilian ancestor said to be a wood sprite), Xeno decides to find the Caravan Bestiary. Helped by a teacher, he learns that scholars traced this remarkable book’s whereabouts to 13th-century Rhodes, but there the trail went cold. He spends the next 15 years tracking the bestiary from Hawaii to Paris, Venice, Philadelphia and Crete, interrupted only by a terrifying stint as a soldier in Vietnam. Christopher deftly intertwines this quest with Xeno’s effort to decipher his family history. The result is a coming-of-age tale richly decorated, but not over-gilded, with animal lore and history...
A literary thriller in which—unusually—neither “literary” nor “thriller” seems an afterthought.
***
Publishers Weekly
In Christopher's magical fifth novel, a sympathetic history teacher takes an
interest in quiet, studious Xeno Atlas, who has developed a burning interest
in real and imaginary animals. "I first heard of the Caravan Bestiary when
I was fifteen years old, and it changed the course of my life," Xeno declares.
The young man undertakes a quest to find the ancient manuscript, which describes
animals left off Noah's Ark (including the "Catoblepas," a white bird
with divining powers) and was assumed lost many years ago. The search entails
an around-the-world journey, wherein Xeno learns the answers to long-standing
family mysteries, uncovers a wealth of lost knowledge and finds true love with
his best friend's sister, the lovely Lena Moretti. Christopher's protagonist
[has] a dead mother; a mysterious, perpetually grieving, peripatetic father;
a shape-shifting shamanistic grandmother; and a lonely, troubled childhood. His
evocative prose yields a narrative loaded with fascinating arcana and intriguing
characters.
***
Library Journal
As in A Trip to the Stars, Christopher here blends intriguingly detailed esoterica with a contemporary coming-of-age story that recalls Sixties excess and anguish to create a distinctive reading experience. Xeno Atlas, whose seafaring father barely puts in an appearance after Xeno’s mother dies in childbirth, is raised mostly by a grandmother who claims among her Sicilian forebears a witch who could commune with animals. With only brilliant but disabled friend Bruno and his sister, Lena, as friends…Xeno manages to get by until his grandmother’s death, when he’s shipped off to boarding school in Maine. There a teacher tells him about the Caravan Bestiary, a lost medieval text reputedly depicting the animals that didn’t make it onto Noah’s Ark. Afterward, through the hell of Vietnam and the years determinedly spent as an independent scholar, Xeno pursues the bestiary and in the end finds something different—maybe even love. [The Bestiary] is a charmed and charming read, compelling in its knowledge, graceful prose, and underlying concern for the animal world.
***
The Los Angeles Times Book Review
The Quest for an Ancient Illuminated Manuscript of Animals, Real and Imagined
By Nick Owchar
With the hunt for an exotic lost book as a story line, one might assume that Nicholas Christopher's "The Bestiary" is in the same family as "The Da Vinci Code" and all its siblings. The novel certainly shimmers with antique lore and mystery like many of these, but it would be too insulting to call this accomplished tale just another nugget in that vein of "edutainment" that Dan Brown and his ilk have strip-mined so completely.
Although Christopher poses an intriguing mystery -- what happened to an ancient book of mythical animals called "The Caravan Bestiary" after it had passed through many hands over the centuries? -- he hasn't sacrificed everything, including characterization, to answer that question. Hardly. Long before we're ever interested in the elusive book, he gives us the poignant, heartbreaking circumstances of Xeno Atlas, and we care about him more than about that quest.
Growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s, Xeno endured so many emotional losses, so much deprivation, that it's a wonder he didn't fall apart. His mother, Marina, died during his birth, something his father, Theodore, a fierce Cretan sailor, reduced to simple terms. "I had lived and she -- the great love of his life -- had died. And he resented it bitterly," Xeno tells us.
To this add the resentment of Marina's family: Her kin sneer at Marina's choice of a husband -- inferior in social status, religion and just about everything else -- and treat the boy as the vulgar product of a union they didn't approve of. The hurt doesn't end there: Xeno's beloved grandmother dies, and he is sent to a Maine boarding school, far from two people who have loved him -- his friend Bruno and Bruno's sister, Lena. Cut adrift, Xeno exists in a state of emotional exile. Drifters of many sorts have figured in Christopher's earlier novels. How does your life have meaning, Christopher asks, when you've been deprived of the personal attachments most of us take for granted?
One answer, Christopher suggested in 2004's "Crossing the Equator," a selection of his poetry, rests in the imagination's ability to appreciate fleeting moments of beauty. Art is a refuge in difficult times: In the poem "Robert Desnos in Havana, 1928," the French surrealist poet, deported to the concentration camps in World War II, "records his dreams / of mermaids in notebooks bound for the furnaces . . . ." Though his work will be destroyed one day, it sustains him when he needs it most.
Similarly, Xeno is sustained when he needs it most by dreams of "The Caravan Bestiary," an "illuminated book filled with all manner of unnatural & fantastical beasts refused entry to the Ark by Noah when he set sail in the Great Flood." "I just can't get it out of my head," Xeno tells one of his teachers. His affinity for this book and all its outcast creatures -- including the majestic griffin and the lethal basilisk -- is touchingly clear to us. Xeno recognizes that studying the book's history is a surrogate for the family history he's been refused. "The dream of finding it . . . had always been a refuge," he says. The book "helped me to tolerate the harsher disappointments -- and worse -- of this world."
"Worse" refers to the Vietnam War. At age 21, Xeno is drafted and stationed just 25 miles from the Cambodian border. As he's taking tactical plans to U.S. forces in the field, Xeno gets caught between enemy troops and American fighter planes that decimate those troops -- and almost kill him as well. Yet his protection of that dossier (aptly code-named Operation Phoenix) turns him into a hero for the military -- and a villain to peace demonstrators on his return to the States. Life has intervened with his quest; Xeno is Galahad, interrupted. But further isolation -- he turns his back on America and moves to France, taking up his research again -- seems only to sharpen his appetite to find the bestiary.
Xeno travels around the Mediterranean, learning more about his family and about the father who never gave him anything except financial support and, after his death, a freighter named the Makara. Xeno's life also intersects with Lena's. Like him, Lena is preoccupied with animals -- not mythical ones but endangered species. When she and her animal liberation group need to transport a menagerie of beasts threatened by warring factions in West Africa, Xeno puts the Makara at her service. Together they set sail with a cargo of animals, biblical allusion and all.
In this, as with other symbolic associations in this novel, Christopher has a light touch. He's a poet, after all, and critics have praised the subtleties of his style. It gives nothing away to say that in Lena, Xeno discovers the only home he's ever needed: "We were alone as we would ever be, like stars on some remote latitude that shine on no one. We could shine for one another . . . . "
On the matter of the quest, of course, silence is required. Xeno traces the bestiary's arrival to 14th century Venice as a gift from a French envoy to the doge. It remained in the doge's family as an odd heirloom, then began another journey. You'll have to read for yourself what happened to it next. Xeno's quest is accomplished but in an unexpected and entirely satisfying way. Christopher defies the thriller formulas; the book ends without gimmicks. "The Bestiary" is the very best example of what happens when antique lore and a compelling human story are in the hands of the right novelist.
***
The Washington Post Book World
Where the Wild Things Are
A young boy's obsession with mysterious medieval animals goes way beyond lions, tigers and bears.
Reviewed by Ron Charles
Long before we became experts at driving animals to extinction, we were desperate to record their existence. Naming the animals was the only work Adam did in Paradise, which suggests something about the fundamental pleasure we still get from identifying creatures. The most ancient paintings in the world show bison and mammoths cavorting. Herodotus, Aristotle and Pliny the Elder produced wide-ranging works of natural history. By the 12th century, Europe was gaga over bestiaries: lavishly illustrated books that described all the known animals, along with mystical creatures, such as the sphinx, the griffin and the chimera. Medieval authors assigned various moral and allegorical significance to each animal as a way of "reading" the natural world that God created. There's something oddly compelling about these ancient portraits -- their strange mingling of wisdom and whimsy.
And now, like the phoenix rising from its ashes, the idea of searching for meaning in lost animals has been reborn in Nicholas Christopher's magical and melancholy novel The Bestiary. The story begins with the childhood of Xeno Atlas in New York in the 1950s. His mother died when he was born, and his father, who never recovered from that loss, travels around the world for months at a time on freighters. "Loneliness was at the center of my childhood," Xeno tells us. "From it proceeded all I was to become."
Left to the care of his maternal grandmother, who "had strong connections to the animal spirits," Xeno is raised on fantastical stories. "I heard about the one-winged stork that flew over the Alps and laid an egg from which an entire city was born; and the serpent that ate the moon and spat out a skyful of stars; and the black bear that fell asleep on a mountaintop and awoke a hundred years later in the same spot, now a tiny island in the sea, and turned himself into a whale." In his dreary household these stories provide an element of necessary magic, and it's no surprise when, for a moment, the boundary between reality and fantasy seems to fray: "Late one night," Xeno writes, "after she finished one of her stories, the stray headlight of a passing car shone through the window and I was stunned to see, not my grandmother, but a red fox, with a ring of white fur around its neck, stretched out on her bed."
Christopher is doing something strange here -- and tantalizing. Another time, Xeno wakes up and sees something perched on his windowsill: "Its wings, tail, and spiky crest were silhouetted against a yellow moon. I was frightened but also thrilled when I realized it was one of the two griffins that graced the parapet of the First National Bank." His story remains entirely realistic, and there's no reason to think these unnatural sightings are anything but the waking dreams of a little boy raised on a rich diet of animal legends, and yet . . . and yet subsequent events suggest, ever so subtly, that his brief visions are in fact insights to some deeper reality, a world of mythological meaning and connection that attracts Xeno for the rest of his life.
Sent to a prison-like boarding school in Maine, the boy takes refuge in his history classes, where he first learns of the medieval bestiaries. Pressed to explain his interest, he can only reply, "I just can't get it out of my head." And so begins a lifelong search for the most fabulous bestiary of all, "The Caravan Bestiary," invented by Christopher and brilliantly woven into the history of several actual manuscripts. This lost document is rumored to include all the animals denied entry on Noah's Ark. "It was one of those rare instances," Xeno tells us, "in which a youthful enthusiasm that could have evaporated instead grew more powerful each year."
Clearly, this quest is motivated by a parallel search for his parents, the mother he never knew and the father he never understood. But what follows is a richly drawn search across Europe, guided by rare manuscripts, stray references in crumbling letters and clues fed to him by sympathetic librarians and collectors. Xeno walks "a road bound on the one side by history and on the other by a luminous shifting terrain defined by faith as well as facts." The provenance of "The Caravan Bestiary" provides a dizzying tour of medieval lore and amateur archaeology, wending through 700 tortuous years of intrigue, including Lord Byron, the Black Death, a seance and corrupt Roman Catholic officials. (Is it possible to read anything nowadays without catching a whiff of The Da Vinci Code?)
As Xeno's search for "The Caravan" draws him into the past, the novel moves through the major events of the mid-20th century, with a powerful section on the Vietnam War and the drug-addled disillusionment that followed. A clever subplot involving a biologist trying to save endangered animals from extinction draws these ancient and modern themes together....The key to this strange novel's allure may be its tantalizing blend of tones: melancholic one moment and a little ridiculous the next. "In a world of infinite metamorphoses," Xeno asks, "who can cleanly separate the fantastical from the commonplace? Who would want to?" Christopher captures that adolescent thrill of falling into the mythological world and finding our deepest fears and desires embodied -- alive, frightening and fantastic.
***
The New York Times Book Review
By Ligaya Mishan
A literary omnivore, Nicholas Christoppher is versed in classical lore and pulp fiction, and his novels, at their best, are a thrilling amalgam of the two: erudite, lyrical and breathlessly paced. In what may be a sly wink at “The Da Vinci Code,” his latest effort concerns a medieval manuscript with a whiff of heresy, suppressed and possibly destroyed by order of the pope. But the story that unfolds features neither murderous monks nor ritual orgies. Here we’re in the hands of a different kind of writer, and his language is primarily that of fable. The opening line sets the tone: “The first beast I laid eyes on was my father.
Christopher writes poetry as well as fiction, and his prose often has the elevated feel of incantation, belonging to an earlier era. So it comes as a bit of a surprise to meet his narrator in the Bronx, circa 1950. Xeno Atlas grows up essentially an orphan: his mother dies in childbirth and his grief-stricken father runs away to sea. At a young age, the boy exhibits a preternatural sympathy for animals, encouraged by his grandmother, who regales him with tales of “the one-wingèd stork that flew over the Alps and laid an egg from which an entire city was born.”
Shipped off to boarding school, Xeno buries himself in his studies and becomes obsessed with the Caravan Bestiary, a renegade religious encyclopedia dedicated to the beasts that were barred from Noah’s ark, left to perish in the flood. These include not only the cryptozoological all-stars — basilisk, chimera, sphinx — but the lesser-known creatures like the baku, which feeds on nightmares, and the mermecolion, part lion, part ant, “so fantastical that, by definition, it cannot survive.” (The peryton also makes an appearance, in a nod to its inventor, Borges — who compiled his own bestiary, “The Book of Imaginary Beings,” itself supposedly based on a long-lost medieval text.)
Xeno’s hunt for the bestiary is quixotic — it is, he soon realizes, a thinly veiled quest for his own identity — and the novel is less a detective story than a kind of theme and variations on the failure of man’s dominion over nature. One character is a biologist who documents the dwindling spectrum of life on earth, another an animal-rights activist running from the law. In Christopher’s most explicit statement, Xeno concludes, after a grim tour of duty in Vietnam: “The human race had yet to render itself extinct; perhaps the animals were just a dry run. Once you believed animals were insensate things, disposable, of utilitarian value only, it wasn’t so hard to move on to people.”
Unlike Christopher’s previous novels, “The Bestiary” merely teeters on the edge of fantasy. Nothing that happens in the book is technically impossible; even the transformation of Xeno’s grandmother into a red fox at the moment of her death can be seen as the delusion of a grieving child. Everything is simply a little larger than life, and all the more interesting for it. “In a world of infinite metamorphoses — only a fraction of which we’re privy to,” Xeno notes, “who can cleanly separate the fantastical from the commonplace? Who would want to?”
The Denver Post
Mythical flights of Fancy Guide Hero
By Robin Vidimos
Nicholas Christopher does many things well in his deftly written, thought-provoking novels, but his stand-out trait is his ability to make the fantastic believable. His work adds a uniquely American fillip to magical realism. And it renders the premise of "The Bestiary," which is built around a search for information about animals refused entry to Noah's ark, utterly plausible.
Xeno Atlas' upbringing is as unusual as his name. His father, a Greek sailor, is gone far more often than he is in port. His Italian mother died in childbirth. For all practical purposes, his family is his maternal grandmother, the only member of his mother's extended family willing to maintain contact with Xeno or his father Theodore. The grandmother raises Xeno with a keen sensibility around an unusual animal world. When they shared a bedroom in a small apartment, he recalls, "On countless nights, after tucking me in, my grandmother retired to her own bed and told me animal stories, punctuated by sound effects, out of the darkness. I heard about the one-winged stork that flew over the Alps and laid an egg from which an entire city was born; and the serpent that ate the moon and spat out a sky full of stars; and the black bear that fell asleep on a mountaintop and awoke a hundred years later in the same spot, now a tiny island in the sea, and turned himself into a whale."
Xeno's friends are few, and at his grandmother's death his father enrolls him in a boys' boarding school. History courses open his eyes to a world of writing about mythical beasts, including texts known as bestiaries. These compilations of animals, real and imagined, were not uncommon during the Middle Ages. One - the Caravan Bestiary - stands out from the rest. This compilation of animals lost in the great flood disappeared in the 13th century, and it is believed that if it is ever rediscovered, it will change the world.
Xeno graduates from high school in 1967. He takes his passion for seeking the Caravan Bestiary to Harvard, though more schooling is not in the cards. His father, who has remained physically and emotionally distant, provides good monetary support; Xeno drops out of school to pursue his passion but instead, finds himself drafted and sent to Vietnam.
"The Bestiary" is part detective tale and partly a story of coming of age. Its central characters are endearing, and several of those who have the greatest impact on Xeno's life play recurring roles. It is good to see them again. One hates to lose touch with old friends.
But what makes "The Bestiary" so unforgettably delightful is the way that Christopher drops the unbelievable casually into place. Xeno remembers awaking from a childhood sleep, to see an animal perched outside his window. "Its wings, tail, and spiky crest were silhouetted against a yellow moon. I was frightened but also thrilled when I realized it was one of the two griffins that graced the parapet of the First National Bank, which I passed on my way to school. ... I always looked up to see if they had moved (they never did). ... At the bank the next morning the griffins were in their usual positions, stony wings enfolded, on opposite ends of the parapet. It seemed something was different - one griffin's head was tilted left instead of right."
***
The Seattle Times
A Quest for Bible of Zoological Mythology in The Bestiary
By Robert Allen Papinchak
Nicholas Christopher is fond of globe-trotting, coming-of-age characters. Young men search for their fathers in the beguiling, episodic "Franklin Flyer" (2002) and the planet-roaming "A Trip to the Stars" (2000). In the enchanting "The Bestiary," Xeno Atlas ultimately discovers romance during a lifelong pursuit for the elusive, legendary book of the title. The novel has an engaging premise. The Caravan Bestiary (so called because it was smuggled across the Libyan desert by caravan) is allegedly an "illuminated book filled with all manner of unnatural & fantastical beasts refused entry to the ark by Noah." It supposedly disappeared in 1255. Xeno's whole life revolves around his search for the book — in the interim he uncovers a wealth of family secrets.
Xeno's world is one of "infinite metamorphoses." An only child of Greek-Italian heritage, he grows up motherless in the Bronx, raised by his maternal grandmother who might be a shape-shifter, just one of the many supernatural elements of the novel. His volatile, disinterested father has a mysterious life in Greece, occasionally sending Xeno three-line postcards and financial support. The "loneliness at the center" of Xeno's childhood becomes the core of who he is. When he is 12, he is shipped off to a boarding school in Maine. There, he begins his antiquarian research in earnest. A sympathetic history professor, Cletis Hood, fuels Xeno's interest in bestiaries with a gift of the Hereford Bestiary, compiled at a remote monastery on the Welsh border around 1390. Xeno begins to track stories of the phoenix, the peryton, the hemicyne, the chimera, griffin, manticore and other creatures of zoological mythology.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Xeno moves from Maine to the jungles of Vietnam in the Army Signal Corps. He unknowingly becomes involved in a dangerous government project. Some of the more intense parts of Xeno's search take place in Europe — from Paris to Venice to Greece. The final mystery of the bestiary is resolved in a fanciful mural discovered in Crete.
"The Bestiary" is a fascinating blend of the bibliophile quest novel merged with romance, intrigue and fantasy.
***
The Honolulu Advertiser
Reality & Fantasy Intertwined
By Christine Thomas
With a name like Xeno Atlas, the quiet hero of Nicholas Christopher's fifth novel might seem inevitably bound for worldly adventure. But his travels to Italy, Vietnam, Hawai'i, or any other place "The Bestiary" alights on are simply points on a map of broader emotional, cerebral and spiritual discoveries. After his mother's death during childbirth, shy Xeno is raised in a dark Bronx apartment by his Sicilian grandmother and long-absent father, a reticent shipman from Crete whom Xeno calls "The first beast I laid eyes on." Xeno finds refuge in his grandmother's fairy tales, a childhood fascination that in high school becomes a lonely but fulfilling obsession with researching real and imagined animals. Soon, he is consumed with finding the elusive and rumored destroyed Caravan Bestiary, an apocryphal book detailing the extraordinary creatures refused passage on Noah's Ark.
Whimsical yet factually grounded, this story of the mythical foundation of societies and one man's search for himself through the animals of lore effortlessly spans centuries of global history, as well as Xeno's childhood, service in Vietnam, and later years as an expatriate. "The Bestiary" cleverly weaves imagination with reality, as if to assert that the two are always twain, and yet in the end, Xeno uncovers something magical that is unknown in the world and something magical that has been in front of him the whole time — but is perhaps more real than anything else. "I don't think there's much difference between what's real and what's fantastic in terms of the overall arc of our lives," says Christopher. "Sometimes the fantastical can be the most real. As I write in the book: In a world of infinite metamorphoses, only a fraction of which we're aware of, who could separate the fantastical from the commonplace?"
AN AUTHOR'S QUEST
Christopher's life is likewise anything but commonplace. While in his early 20s, his poetry and writing were already appearing regularly in the New Yorker, and today continues to be included in numerous anthologies and magazines, from Esquire to the New Republic. He's published five novels, one, "A Trip to the Stars," is partially set in Hawai'i; eight volumes of poetry; and one nonfiction, on film noir. Like his wandering hero, Christopher, who was born and raised in New York City, was educated at Harvard and lived abroad, was for a time raised by his grandmother after almost losing his own mother in childbirth. She arguably planted the novel's first seeds by telling him elaborate fairy tales, which, like Xeno, fed his own dreams and imagination. "As an artist, I was also looking for something like the Caravan Bestiary," he says. "In a practical way I can see a lot of my childhood in him and the way he grew up in his head, but as he gets older we diverge. What I do is a lot more grounded."
HUMANS AND BEASTS
The book's meticulous foundation — in well-imagined characters as well as historical and scientific fact — elevates it above most adventure tales. Christopher wraps in absorbing notes about extinction, revealed through Xeno's ailing friend Bruno; animal rights, seen in the work of Lena, the friend Xeno secretly loves; and the disappearing boundaries between humans and nature, witnessed with his family. "I wanted to make this a story of this man's life, or else I would have just made him a professor searching for a book," says Christopher. In a novel filled with beastly people as well as animals, it is human action — particularly Xeno's father's physical absence and lack of anything but financial support, and the Vietnam War — that defines the arc and meaning of Xeno's journey. He and the novel walk two worlds, just as Christopher's lyrical writing style mirrors his work as both poet and novelist. On one side, Christopher says, are the hard facts of life and history, on the other the world of fantasy and dreams. "We all do that. We all travel through life in a very pragmatic way, but when you look out the other way there's a dream world that often doesn't make sense."
HAWAI'I CONNECTION
If there's a dream world on Earth, for Christopher that may be Hawai'i. He fell in love with the Hawaiian Islands after his first visit, to Kaua'i in 1992, seeing them as a place of renewal and life. This is one reason why, after Xeno is wounded in Vietnam, the novel stops in Honolulu, where Xeno recovers at Tripler Army Medical Center and later does research at the University of Hawai'i, and then on Moloka'i, where he recovers his passion for the Caravan Bestiary. As part of his extensive research Christopher walked where his hero walks, in Hawai'i, as well as the novel's other settings. "I wanted to have a real sense of the place. I went to the university in Manoa and went to the library and spent some time there," he says. "I mostly spent time in the Foster Botanical Garden to get a feel for the place and the past. It was that kind of research of place that I wanted to have." The novel captures an authentic and never romanticized Hawai'i, an accuracy born of Christopher's visits over the past 15 years. He began writing "The Bestiary" while on Kaua'i. When he visits, he says, he brings his copy of Martha Beckwith's "Hawaiian Mythology" to read. "If I'd never gone to Hawai'i, it would have just been a literary device," says Christopher, "but for me it was personal."
MORE ISLAND TIES
After five years of writing, "The Bestiary" was published in early July, but Christopher's artistic quest hasn't concluded. Alongside teaching writing at Columbia University, he's working on a new novel, partially set in 1950s Honolulu, a poetry collection and a nonfiction book about the mythography of islands. But whereas many of his books explore the search for lost things, Christopher seems to be finding something — or some place — in his writing. "Hawai'i is appearing in my books more and more, and eventually it will be a whole book," he says. "It seems to be a place — unlike New York, which couldn't be more different — that works on my imagination."
***
The New York Sun
Where the Wild Things Are
By Ned Vizzini
To play a game of "Dungeons & Dragons," one needs three books: "The Player's Handbook," the "Dungeon Master's Guide," and the "Monstrous Compendium," which lists all of the monsters in the game. It is the "Compendium," always, that is huddled over by players and never lent out.
Nicholas Christopher taps into this fascination with mythic creatures in "The Bestiary" (Dial Press, 320 pages, $25), his fifth novel. The book details the life of Xeno Atlas, a scholar on a quest to find the legendary Caravan Bestiary, an illustrated account of all of the animals denied entry to Noah's ark: hippogriffs, manticores, and the like. In this process he must leave home, get through boarding school, endure the Vietnam War, search for clues in Hawaii and Venice, and wrestle with a host of family difficulties.
Mr. Christopher, author of "A Trip to The Stars" (2000), is a gifted prose stylist, with vivid but concise descriptions of the far-off locales that populate the book. And Xeno Atlas (what a name! Mr. Christopher certainly shoots for the stars with that one) grabs the reader from the beginning with his hardscrabble background and proves a serviceable guide through the intricacies of research and scholarship that comprise the search.
The author begins in the Bronx in the 1950s, where his characterizations are most vivid and effective. Streets and playgrounds are sketched with beautiful efficiency. Xeno lives with his grandmother, who introduces him to the spirits of the animal world: the rodents, canines, and bovines that inhabit the scurrilous, vicious, and dim-witted among us. The rumored granddaughter of a Sicilian dryad, Xeno's grandmother also introduces him to the mythical animals that will drive his quest. (Particularly in vogue is the bear who turns himself into a whale when his mountain becomes an island.)
Attuned to his grandmother's gifts, Xeno begins seeing griffins, foxes, and panthers around the neighborhood. The real animal, however, is his father. Adorned with a serpent tattoo on his back, he ships off for months at a time as a seaman ("the man who shoveled coal into the furnace"), sending home heartbreakingly terse postcards. As the father fades away, he seems less human and more serpent, a device that peppers the book....As in Mr. Christopher's other novels, the history provides much of the fun. Looking for the Caravan Bestiary puts Xeno in contact, through rare books, with a host of merchants and raconteurs from the Renaissance. (Xeno finds that the book has been bought, inherited, and fleeced for centuries.) Particularly fascinating are the relayed adventures of Lord Byron, whose stay in Venice topped any baby boomer depravity, and the plague doctors of the Black Death who dressed in bird suits to cure victims, until they perished themselves.
"The Bestiary" raises large questions about our relationship to the animal world. The impulse to genetically engineer, which we typically think of as a modern issue, gets cast in a new light as the reader learns that hybrid animals have occupied us since the beginning of history. Mr. Christopher presents a few great ones in his glossary: the mermecolion, an ant-lion; the bonnacon, a horse with the head of a bull that spits fire. The plight of modern animals is laid out in stark scientific terms by Xeno's childhood friend Bruno, who tells him that until the 18th century, the Earth's creatures went extinct at the rate of .25 a year; now, it is 110 a day.
A wry distrust of Christianity and its history-mysteries place "The Bestiary" somewhere in the vicinity of "The Da Vinci Code," but Mr. Christopher attempts something more difficult with this novel: a feast for the curious that spices its lessons with literary fiction instead of action....As the book moves (not races, but moves pleasantly) toward its conclusion, the characters from Xeno's past reveal their adult and animal natures with equal clarity — one turns out to be a proud peacock, one a hardy she-beaver....In the end, although Xeno's world traveling and book hunting prove mostly fruitful, his central challenge is to depart from his childhood animal world and face real life. "The Bestiary" ultimately offers a meditation on our need to fight the modern tendency to present our images instead of ourselves.
***
The Boston Globe
Novels involving perilous searches for lost ancient relics, artifacts, manuscripts, codes, formulas, and what-have-you clog publishing's pipelines. Nicholas Christopher's The Bestiary is something different. Christopher is a compelling storyteller and writer. His novel is not a thriller, a mystery, a horror story, a mystical journey. It's an old-fashioned quest, in which our hero, Xeno Atlas, finds himself while searching for an ancient text, lost for many centuries, the "Caravan Bestiary," a compilation of the animals that didn't make it onto Noah's ark. Among these fantastic creatures were the centaur, half man, half horse; the griffin, offspring of an eagle and a lion; the zaratan, a sea turtle so large sailors would mistake it for an island.
Xeno's mother died in childbirth; his emotionally distant seaman father was seldom home. Sent off to boarding school at 15, Xeno meets a history teacher who tells him about the "Caravan Bestiary." Finding the legendary text becomes an obsession that parallels Xeno's personal search for his elusive father. Later, at Harvard, then during a tour of duty in the military in Vietnam, Xeno keeps returning to his quest for it. He settles in Paris and scours the libraries and museums of Europe for clues to its whereabouts. His research turns up links to the Black Death, a doge of Venice, Gnostic heretics, Magellan, the Knights Hospitallers, and Lord Byron, among other historical events and people.
The Bestiary is a fascinating novel, stuffed with all sorts of arcane information.
***
The Columbus Dispatch
Mythical Species Left Off Ark Spur Search
By Bill Eichenberger
Xeno Atlas, the hero of the Nicholas Christopher novel The Bestiary, is obsessed with the past and has, by his admission, "spent a lot of time in libraries and archives." A scholar, Atlas is on a mission to find a possibly apocryphal book known as the Caravan Bestiary, which is said to have described all of the animals refused passage on Noah's ark.
The mystery takes him to Paris and Venice, to dusty libraries that hold secrets and mysteries that will take decades to unravel. It is for Atlas to uncover the past, to learn about the lives of Doge Andrea Dandolo and Antonio Pigafetta -- two men thought to have owned the only copy of theCaravan Bestiary before it disappeared 400 years ago. But it's even more difficult for Atlas to know his mother, who died in childbirth, and his father, a sailor who spent most of his time at sea and lived a double life -- one in New York, the other in Greece.
Whether the animals in the Bestiary ever existed is of little concern to Atlas, for he knows that the names of the creatures and their stories carry a weight of their own:"All that survives of the chimera is its name," Atlas confides, "which has devolved into a common noun signifying the impossible or the fanciful. But the chimera embodied a fiercer truth, which soon enough I would learn for myself: Our illusions can ravage us as mercilessly as violence or disease."
In any case, the mere fact that an animal no longer exists is no argument that it never existed. Even at this late date, naturalists discover new species and paleontologists find the fossils of fantastic creatures.
A character tells Atlas near the midpoint of The Bestiary: "Today (in 1975), the rate of extinction is 1,000 species per year. By 2000, it will be 40,000 -- 110 per day."Certainly no one would argue that those 40,000 species never existed, based merely on the fact that they have ceased to exist. As such reasoning settles in, the fantastic becomes not only possible but even probable.
Atlas' story is its own kind of bestiary. His grandmother sees the ghosts of animals all around her in New York and plays a game with her grandson, sitting on park benches and comparing passers-by to the creatures they most resemble. Liberally sprinkled throughout, in bestiary fashion, are descriptions of animals such as "the Chinese Dragon": "The pearl under its chin is the source of its power. It exhales burning clouds that rain fire upon the Earth. The first emperors were descended from 3,000-year-old dragons. At death, the emperor ascended to heaven on a dragon's back." So it goes with the hyena, the phoenix, the winged horse Pegasus and other wondrous creatures: a one-legged bird that nests along rivers and carries water to the clouds, and a mountain dog with a human face that feasts on nettles and sleeps in cemeteries.
The Bestiary is taken up with a scholarly quest in search of a rare manuscript. Atlas does spend several gripping chapters fighting "in country" during the Vietnam War. And he has a love interest. Nevertheless, the novel's greatest pleasures might lie in its esoterica, its fascinating trips down side paths of the fantastic. In which case Christopher might well be describing his ideal reader when Atlas calls an old schoolteacher "someone with a deep and eclectic curiosity."
***
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
By Chauncey Mabe
In this tantalizing novel Christopher mines history and myth in a way that makes him seem a Dan Brown with intelligence and moral heft, or, seen from a different angle, an Umberto Eco with a lighter, more readable touch.
Growing up in the Bronx in the '50s, the resonantly named Xeno Atlas becomes fascinated by his Sicilian grandmother's tales of animal spirits. Lonely and traumatized by the early death of his mother, he spends the next two decades in search of a legendary book called ''Caravan Bestiary,'' a compilation of animals lost in Noah's flood.
Atlas' quest for the book stands in for his struggle to untangle the complex traumas of his family legacy, not to mention the meaning of life. Christopher is also a well-regarded poet, which may explain the nimble grace of this intricate, clever book.
***
The Montreal Gazette
Legendary volume describes lost species
By Claude Lalumiere
Nicholas Christopher's The Bestiary plays with the boundaries between realism and fantasy. It's not really a fantasy novel per se, but it deals with the fantastic, and its flirtation with the supernatural adds a subtle layer of excitement and wonderment throughout.
As a boy, beginning with the magical animal tales his grandmother shares with him, Xeno Atlas becomes fascinated with animals, the mythic role they play in human life and, eventually, the Caravan Bestiary, a legendary volume that describes the species that were not granted passage on Noah's ark. This fascination turns into a lifelong quest for the elusive book.
Set against the backdrop of the social and political changes of the 1960s and 1970s, the novel follows Xeno's travels around the world as he gets drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, investigates the trail of the Caravan Bestiary and learns about his family's past. Xeno's life is suffused with myth and with a focused awareness of the animal presences around him, both living and symbolic. The novel, too, is enriched by animals, whether it be through descriptions of legendary beasts from various bestiaries, chance encounters with wild animals, people who dedicate their lives to animal rights or animal conservation, or eerie animal manifestations that might be dreams, hallucinations or mystic, primal episodes.
Wisely, Christopher lets his text stay ambiguous on such matters, emphasizing emotional impact and mythic resonance over pat answers. And that's true of The Bestiary as a whole.
***
A.V. Club of The Onion
Reviewed by Donna Bowman
Somewhere forgotten in an archive, or guarded by a secret society, or suppressed by the powers that be, lies an item that contains the secret of life, the universe, and everything—a direct plug-and-play download from the mind of God. This premise has fueled a truckload of airport-waiting-room bestsellers over the past decade, but the genre has finally grown out of its adolescent Indiana-Jones-vs.-the-Illuminati breathlessness and produced some stunning literature. The latest entry tones down the fantastic elements of its protagonist's globetrotting quest, and weaves a melancholy tale about extinction and survival, peppered by mythological beasts.
Xeno, a second-generation immigrant growing up in the Bronx, clings to his grandmother's tales of shape-shifting humans and weird creatures to distract him from his mostly-absent father. When a high-school teacher tells him about the Caravan Bestiary, a legendary illuminated manuscript listing the animals Noah refused to allow on the ark, he begins a search for the long-lost book. Ancient scholars believed that the universal bestiary God wrote at creation, when combined with the Bible, would constitute the sum of all knowledge, and the Caravan Bestiary represents the largest missing piece of this divine work. On and off, through the turbulent '60s, in the Vietnam War, and through years of research in European libraries, Xeno tracks the book in hopes of fixing his metamorphosing past into a recognizable shape, however grotesque the combination of animal elements might turn out to be.
The phoenix is the book's central symbol—the star of a cyclical tale of destruction and rebirth without conflict. Christopher gives us a pure, poignant search for identity without villains or trumped-up suspense, and a hero sleepwalking through history with his eyes fixed on the distant past. The story is more about the mystery of broken relationships than about chimeras and centaurs. Somewhere, Xeno hopes, all the pieces that go missing in a life are collected, preserved, and celebrated. At the novel's quiet, haunting close, Xeno promises to keep the secret he's learned, only to find that the person who revealed it to him doesn't care whether it becomes known. The genre's Gnostic premise is turned on its head, without fanfare and even with a sense of regret. The world's mysteries don't need solving—only the self's.
***Bookslut.com
By Colleen Mondor
In his new novel, The Bestiary, author Nicholas Christopher has crafted a literary mysteries about a missing historic manuscript but does not include high speed chases, Vatican conspiracies, or last minute showdowns with arch rivals. In fact, as his protagonist Xeno Atlas pursues the long lost medieval text Caravan Bestiary, I was reminded more than once of Josephine Tey’s classic Daughter of Time. Xeno is also in pursuit of a historic mystery, in his case what happened to the Bestiary, but he approaches his quest from a different angle then those who pursued it before him. Most importantly, he finds what he is looking for without any poorly explained and ludicrous flashes of brilliance, relying instead on a dogged determinedness and unflinching belief that the book will one day be found.
The Bestiary begins with young Xeno being raised by his maternal grandmother while his merchant marine father is away at sea. His mother died when he was born, and, even though her family never forgave her for the man she married, his grandmother still came to raise him. She filled his life with stories of fantastic animals and suggestions that his ancestors were gifted in mysterious ways. After her death, Xeno finds himself sent to boarding school. He is left with only a now distant tie to his best friend, his family, and his beloved dog that he had to leave behind. The German shepherd Re dies just a month later:
Two weeks later Bruno sent me Re’s ashes. I opened the package in the bathroom, away from the other boys, tears flooding my eyes. The ashes were in a tight gray packet the size of a brick. I couldn’t believe my dog’s bodily self had been reduced to that. Bruno also sent Re’s leather collar and the medallion imprinted with his name, my name and my old address. I placed them and the ashes alongside my grandmother’s music box in the trunk under my bed. Now Re’s spirit had joined hers and my mother’s.
Throughout my stay at that school, I felt his presence, not as a shadowy mist, but a weight that shifted gently at the end of the bed, or a rustle in the shadows, or a brushing against my leg when I walked in the woods.
Later, Bruno’s firefighter father dies in an accident and Xeno goes home for the funeral, connecting with Bruno’s sister in a way the two, now teenagers, have never felt before. In Lena, he finds someone who understands his own loss, although they are each missing something -- or someone -- different.
It pained me to see her like that, but I didn’t try to draw her out.
"I understand you want to help,” she said, blowing smoke into the darkness, “but I can’t see anything in front of me right now. All those people. I just want my father back.” Her eyes softened. “I’m glad you’re here, Xeno.”
I took her hand. I wanted to hold her.
There is a lot more in store for Lena and Xeno as they travel in and out of each other’s lives, but before that relationship can unfold Xeno has to discover the Caravan Bestiary and begin his long personal journey to recovering it. He is introduced to the book while at school, at the age of 15. His history teacher tells him about it after Xeno professes an interest in imaginary animals (this follows the interest generated by stories he was told by his grandmother). He learns that bestiaries are a category of books devoted to imaginary animals. In printed form, the subject dates back to the Middle Ages, and Christopher draws strongly from the known facts about such books, including real titles and histories, when detailing Xeno’s growing interest in the subject. The Caravan Bestiary is fiction, however. As his teacher explains it was, “an incendiary work, at one time known only to the powerful -- princes and churchmen -- who believed in its latent power, and to scholars who secretly passed it among themselves.” Its contents were, “the animals lost in the Great Flood.”
In other words, as Xeno exclaims, “The ones that didn’t make it onto Noah’s ark.”
According to an interview on his site, Christopher based the Caravan on existing bestiaries such as the one found at the Abbey of Revesby in Lincolnshire, which was compiled by 13th century monks. He also used the lives of true researchers over the centuries who have hunted bestiaries to imbue Xeno’s own hunt with an air of authenticity. This attention to detail, and the namedropping of recognizable historic figures like Lord Byron, add another layer to Xeno’s story, and make it far more believable than other literary mysteries.
As the teenage Xeno becomes consumed (obsessed is a word fraught with too many negative connotations for use here) with finding the Caravan Bestiary, his nearly nonexistent relationship with his distant father collapses and he sees his childhood friendships fade into only the most occasional contact. His college years are given only a few pages of text as he drifts from curiosity about the Caravan into an ultimately unfortunate romantic relationship and a lot of late nights spent in the thrall of drugs and alcohol. As the book is set in the late 1960s, it is no surprise when Christopher turns the narrative to a devastating chapter in Vietnam where Xeno is nearly killed. It is while recovering in Hawaii from his combat injuries that he reconnects with his teenage interest (and former history teacher) and commits again to finding the long lost text.
Although there is a strong parallel storyline about the loss of family in The Bestiary, which in some ways makes much of the book read as an exceptional coming-of-age story which will certainly appeal to some teens, as a historian I was seduced by Christopher’s many lyrical passages about history and the stirring way in which he brings the past alive again and again. Consider this from Xeno’s teacher:
“There were eighteen Alexandrias,” he explained, “Alexander chose the sites himself: in Persia, India, even Siberia. Only the Egyptian Alexandria survives. In Scythia, Alexandria was a city of sandstone towers. By the Indus River, it was a sprawl of canals, with houses on stilts. The Babylonian Alexandria contained a zoo, with exotic animals from around his empire. Kabul, Afghanistan, was one of the Alexandrias. And this should interest you: Alexander also named one city Bucephalia, after his horse, and another, Peritas, to honor his dog.”
The history and historical references are deep in The Bestiary,and for those with any interest in lost books, mythology or animal legends, this novel is going to be a delight from beginning to end. But as much as it is about a determined man’s hunt for a historical mystery, it also just as much about him coming to grips with his own lost family and the manner in which the missing text manages to help him find himself. For romantics I will point out that Lena does return, all grown up, at a critical juncture in the story, and her contribution to the book’s emotional punch must certainly be included.
Finally, I was a bit surprised to read in Booklist’s review of The Bestiary that the, “novel’s potential falls somewhat flat under the weight of its leisurely pace and overabundant detail, lacking the emotive power of Byatt’s Possession or the atmospheric tension of Safon’s Shadow of the Wind.” As a reader who thoroughly enjoyed both of those novels, I can only wonder why the way in which those authors ratcheted up the tension must be considered the rule here, and for deviating from its path Christopher has failed somehow. The tension in this book is of a far more personal type than Byatt’s or Safon’s -- it is all about Xeno and his pursuit, and does not involve the machinations of others. I found The Bestiary to be a far more elegant -- and realistic -- adventure into the past than the other titles. I enjoyed all of them a great deal, but Nicholas Christopher’s work seemed most familiar and possible; it is, in essence, the sort of adventure that any lover of history (literary, mythical or otherwise) could one day hopefully experience.
***
BookPage
There are coming-of-age novels, and then there are the odd and mystical tales written by novelist and poet Nicholas Christopher. His latest effort, The Bestiary, bounds from New York City tenements to Vietnam to the Mediterranean as we follow the heroically named Xeno Atlas on his quest for dragons. OK, maybe not dragons, exactly, but how far behind can the fairy-tale firebreathers be when we’re on the trail of griffins, centaurs and the legendary phoenix? What Xeno seeks is the Caravan Bestiary, a book listing all of the animals that were supposedly left off of Noah’s Ark. The book, which has danced in and out of history since the Middle Ages, becomes an obsession for Xeno. It’s not hard to understand why.
Like the mythical creatures of the Bestiary, Xeno also has been left behind. His mother died in childbirth and his sailor father is a sporadic presence in Xeno’s life. His only friends are a sickly boy named Bruno and his sister Lena, at whose home he spends as much time as he does in the Bronx apartment he shares with his grandmother. When his grandmother dies, Xeno’s father shunts him off to boarding school, where a professor tells him about the Bestiary.
As in most of Christopher’s novels, his language possesses a lyricism that sets it apart from the ordinary. Xeno also avoids the prosaic. He goes off to war and comes back whole. At a crossroads, he resumes his passionate hunt for the Bestiary. The chase allows him to forget about the bleakness of his own lonely life. If you search for something long enough, you become the quest. It soon becomes evident that while trying to discover the ancient tome, Xeno is trying to discover himself. But sometimes, even when the journey remains unchanging, the destination has unwittingly transformed. And Xeno, like so many others, finds out that what he really was looking for was right in front of him all the time.
Xeno never loses his belief that animals we think of as mythical once roamed the Earth. While his path is hardly straight, it is right. It is left to the reader to decide whether he achieves his dream, but the one thing that seems fairly certain is that, despite the false starts, twists and turns, this is one kid who will end up all right.
***
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Romance, Fantasy Abide in Mysterious World of 'The Bestiary'
Nicholas Christopher's The Bestiary is a fascinating biblioquest novel with an engaging premise.
The Caravan Bestiary...is purportedly an "illuminated book filled with all manner of unnatural & fantastical beasts refused entry to the ark by Noah." Bronx resident Xeno Atlas devotes his whole life searching for the book, which supposedly disappeared in 1255. Along the way, he uncovers a wealth of family secrets...
***
The Christian Science Monitor
Xeno Atlas was a lonely boy who became intrigued with animals, both real and fictional. The Bestiary, the captivating sixth novel of Nicholas Christopher, tells the story of Atlas who ends up traveling around the world as he searches for the Caravan Bestiary, a mythic list of all the animals not included on Noah's Ark.
***
Fantasy Book Critic
Ever since the overwhelming success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), there’s been a spate of similar-themed thrillers/mysteries that have been released, including James Rollins’ Map of Bones, The Testament by Eric Van Lustbader, Ian Caldwell’s The Rule of Four and countless others. Based on first impressions you could probably throw The Bestiary into that mix, but that would be doing the book a disservice since the latest work of fiction by Nicholas Christopher, who’s also put out four novels, eight volumes of poetry and a non-fiction on film noir, is a much superior and different breed of book.
Starting in the Bronx, sometime in the 1950s/60s, we’re introduced to protagonist Xeno Atlas who, through a first-person narrative, revisits his childhood, including his estranged relationship with a father that is never home, a mother that he never knew, a spiritual grandmother who passes on to him her affinity & love for animals, and the Morettis who were as close to a traditional family as he ever had. From there, readers will join Xeno as he attends a boarding school in Maine, experiments with drugs & love, gets drafted into the Vietnam War, and embarks on a quest for the legendary Caravan Bestiary that spans centuries and the globe, including Hawaii, Paris, Italy, Africa and Greece…
Combining a coming-of-age tale with historical information, animal mythology and a dash of the supernatural, The Bestiary is a fascinating novel that delivers on many different levels. For instance, if you love characters that are sincere, easy to relate to and emotionally complex, then there’s plenty of that to be found in The Bestiary. And I’m not just talking about Xeno who is a wonderfully wrought main character, full of personality and haunted by inner demons. I’m also referring to the many supporting players, such as the Morettis – Bruno, Lena, etc., Xeno’s nanny Evgènia, his history teacher Cletis Hood, and others who each have their own touching tale to share. In truth, the book sometimes verges on the desolate for the characters, but when something positive does happen, it’s made all the more poignant because of the hard times they’ve had to go through.
On the other hand, if you appreciate the more scholarly aspects of literature, then The Bestiary offers plenty of that as well. History buffs in particular should appreciate the detailed research put into the book as Mr. Christopher skillfully weaves fact with fiction, specifically with such real-life past figures as Andrea Dandolo, doge of Venice, Antonio Pigafetta of the Magellan voyage, and Lord Byron, author of Don Juan. Nicholas Christopher also takes certain liberties with Noah’s Ark and the Book of Life, and provides numerous legends & fables from around the world on many different animals both mythological and real, including phoenixes, foxes, panthers, etc. This was actually one of my favorite parts of The Bestiary and I particularly enjoyed the selection of Fabulous Beasts from the Caravan Bestiary, which is included at the end of the book.
Writing-wise, The Bestiary is quite impressive. Prose is vibrant and lyrical, probably due to Mr. Christopher’s extensive poetry background. The aforementioned characterization is superb as is the author’s meticulous historical research. Descriptions in the book of people, places and things are eloquently rendered, in particular the many exotic locales that Xeno visits, which are brought to life with vivid clarity. Additionally, Mr. Christopher’s experience in poetry plays an important role in the more fantastical elements of the book. While certain events in The Bestiary could be considered somewhat mystical, for the most part the supernatural occurrences are metaphorical in nature, representing universal themes of family, death, love, loss, loneliness and rebirth. In short, virtually every aspect of The Bestiary is skillfully executed by Nicholas Christopher, and because of that, the book is an absolute joy to read…I thoroughly loved “The Bestiary” and highly recommend it to anyone who appreciates high-quality fiction. All I ask is that you don’t mistake the novel for a Da Vinci Code clone or other run-of-the-mill historical thriller and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the intelligence, depth, emotiveness and magic that The Bestiary has to offer…
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Read the opening pages of The Bestiary
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