The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
Author(s): John Vaillant
It's December 1997 and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl outside a remote village in Russia's Far East. To the horrified astonishment of a team of hunters, it emerges that the attacks are not random: the tiger is engaged in a vendetta.
Injured and starving, it must be found before it strikes again, and the story becomes a battle for survival between two main characters: Yuri Trush, the lead tracker, and the tiger itself.
Culminating in a showdown deep in the Siberian forest, The Tiger is a haunting, spellbinding tale of a hunt to the death; of man and nature in collision; of the ancient relationship between predators and prey; and an intimate portrait of a remarkable animal and its increasingly threatened world.
General Information
- :
- : Hodder & Stoughton
- : Sceptre
- : 0.281
- : 01 September 2011
- : books
Other Specifications
- : John Vaillant
- : Paperback
- : English
- : 384
- : Illustrations (chiefly col.), maps, ports. (chiefly col.)
More About The Product
The gripping true story of the hunt for a man-eating tiger across the forbidding landscape of Russia's Far East...
'The structure of Vaillant's nonfiction hunting tale echoes that of Moby-Dick, alternating a gripping chase narrative - the search, in the late 1990s, for a man-eating Amur tiger in the Primorye region on Russia's far eastern border - with dense explanations of the culture and ecology surrounding the chase.' - New York Times
'The Tiger also counts as a supreme example of true-crime writing driven by wide-angle empathy and compassion. Some readers may choose to shelve it, not among cosy wildlife yarns, but with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.' - Boyd Tonkin, Independent
'This is an altogether different kind of manhunt story ... The pursuit culminates in a breathtaking stand-off of man versus cat in a forest clearing - a denouement every bit as explosive and surprising as the raid in Abbottabad earlier this week.' - Hampton Sides, Wall Street Journal
'A personal favourite of mine, an extraordinary account of a tracker on the trail of a Siberian man-eating tiger in 1997. Along the way we get a load of tiger facts and a beautiful portrait of a forbidding region. It is a stunning, lovely, lovely book.' - Bookseller
'extraordinary ... a brilliantly told tale of man and nature' - Tim Flannery, New York Review of Books
'a remarkable story, exceptionally well told.' - Financial Times
'The Tiger is the sort of book I very much like and rarely find. Humans are hard-wired to fear tigers, so this book will attract intense interest.' - Annie Proulx
'The Tiger takes us on a journey to the raw edge of civilization, to a world of vengeful cats and venal men, a world that, in Vaillant's brilliant telling, is simultaneously haunting and enchanting.' - Hampton Sides, author of Ghost Soldiers
John Vaillant is the award winning author of The Golden Spruce. He has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Outside, National Geographic and Men's Journal, among other publications. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife and children.