Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items

MAMMOTH

Chris Flynn

Narrated by a 13,000-year-old extinct American mastodon, Mammoth is the (mostly) true story of how the skull of a Tyrannosaurus bataar, a pterodactyl, a prehistoric penguin, the severed hand of an Egyptian mummy and the narrator himself came to be on sale at a 2007 natural history auction in Manhattan.

Ranging from the Pleistocene Epoch to nineteenth-century America and beyond, including detours to Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany, Mammoth illuminates a period of history when ideas about science and religion underwent significant change. By tracing how and when the fossils were unearthed, Mammoth traverses time and place to reveal humanity's role in the inexorable destruction of the natural world.

Chris Flynn is the author of The Glass Kingdom and A Tiger in Eden, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Age, The Australian, Griffith Review, Meanjin, Australian Book Review, The Saturday Paper, Smith Journal, The Big Issue, Monster Children and many other publications. He has conducted interviews for The Paris Review and is a regular presenter at literary festivals across Australia. Chris lives on Phillip Island, next to a penguin sanctuary.

Available products
Book Published 2020-05-01 by UQP University of Queensland Press - St Lucia (AUS)

Comments

Funny, warm and totally unique - I loved it.

'Long before the USUSSR 'Missile gap' there was the USEurope 'Mammoth gap', which President Thomas Jefferson set out to fix. Chris Flynn's riveting mixture of fact and whimsy makes previously foreign names like Palaeospheniscus and Canis dirusmemorable fellow travellers like Huck Finn and Ulysses. He gracefully leverages history to help us think about the future, big pictures and deep time.' - Dr George Church, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, and head of the Harvard Woolly Mammoth Revival team

Audio: ANZ, Wavesound

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.

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.

What an absolute joy of a book! If you've been feeling like the novel is an endangered species, then Mammoth is the book to bring it back to life for you. Mammoth shows anthropocentrism as the laughable delusion that it is, while still affirming the value and significance of story. This 13,000-year-old skeleton is my favourite character in years, and this hilarious and heartbreaking book is precisely what we hominids need right now. Read it immediately!

Mammoth by Chris Flynn was shortlisted in the 2021 Indie Book Awards for Fiction, and cover designers, WBYK team, have been longlisted in the Australian Book Designers Association Awards.

Mammoth is a little gem of a book and a joy to read. It defies categorisation - historical fiction, social commentary, humour (in spades) and a look at humanity's impact on the planet through the eyes of a creature we once shared it with, all singing together so nicely. The real treat is the voice of the central character - curmudgeonly and erudite yet heart-breakingly lost and confused, and utterly believable as a relic of a lost world.

If a fossil could speak, it would tell a thousand words. Chris Flynn's Mammoth elegantly fuses fiction with fact and reminds us that fossils are not just objects of curiosity and fascination. They are the remains of once-living creatures who had emotions, who fought, loved, and survived. The duration of their lived experience pales in comparison with that of their geological history, not to mention their time as "trophy" specimens prized by avid fossil collectors. Flynn captures this history artfully, accurately and humorously in Mammoth, where he brings these extraordinary creatures back to life, from death to décor, through superb storytelling.

A tour-de-force, a brilliant book, a witty vaccine for the planet.

Chris Flynn has written a brilliant, hilarious, and curiously moving novel, featuring one 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 Woolly Mammoth's skeleton before? Because nobody was ever smart enough to do it. I simply love this story.