Audiobook
£0.00
with membership trial

Hardcover
£24.95

Paperback
£2.79

Buy used £2.79

FREE delivery 18 - 22 August. Details

Select delivery location

Used: Very Good | Details

Sold by ChironMediaLtd

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

See all 2 images

Follow the author

Yann Martel

Life of Pi Paperback – 17 May 2003

by Yann Martel (Author)

4.3 18,737 ratings

See all formats and editions

After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, one solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific.The crew of the surviving vessel consists of a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan, a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger and Pi - a 16-year-old Indian boy.The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary pieces of literary fiction of recent years. Yann Martel's Life of Pi is a transformative novel, a dazzling work of imagination that will delight and astound readers in equal measure. It is a triumph of storytelling and a tale that will, as one character puts it, make you believe in God.

Print length

319 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Canongate Books Ltd
Publication date

17 May 2003
Dimensions

12.9 x 2.1 x 19.8 cm
ISBN-10

184195392X
ISBN-13

978-1841953922
See all details

Khaled Hosseini
1,763
Paperback
30 offers from £6.49
Harper Lee
127,665
Paperback
70 offers from £1.00
Mark Haddon
32,001
Paperback
Teachers’ pickfor school years 1-9
21 offers from £2.87
Vikram Seth
3,913
Hardcover
18 offers from £1.70
Toni Morrison
15,948
Paperback
46 offers from £3.06
Yann Martel
26
Paperback
9 offers from £5.24

Popular highlights in this book

What are Popular highlights?

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
Highlighted by 14,011 Kindle readers
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.
Highlighted by 8,483 Kindle readers
I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.
Highlighted by 5,710 Kindle readers

Product description

Review

Every page offers something of tension, humanity, surprise, or even ecstasy ― * The Times *

A terrific book . . . fresh, original, smart, devious, and crammed with absorbing lore -- Margaret Atwood ― * Sunday Times *

A unique and original story, brilliantly told ― * Guardian *

Full of clever tricks, amusing asides and grand originality ― * Daily Telegraph *

Ultimately uplifting ― * Daily Mail *

Extraordinary...Life of Pi could renew your faith in the ability of novelists to invest even the most outrageous scenario with plausible life ― * New York Times Book Review *

Martel's engaging characterization and vivid description enliven and enrich this dreamy, fantastic tale ― * The Times *

Its appeal has endured, with a worldwide 'readalong' of the book next month and a moniker as a 'modern classic' to boot. The moniker, in this instance, is utterly deserved . . . Pi is bewitching, the tale both nihilistic and naïve, philosophical and playful, deeply moving while always treading the line clear of schmalz -- Arifa Akbar ― * Independent *

Martel has a warm way of engaging with the reader -- Robert Burdock ― * RobAroundBooks.com *

About the Author

Yann Martel is the author of a short story collection, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, and of four novels, Self, Beatrice & Virgil, Life of Pi (for which he was awarded the 2002 Man Booker Prize), and his latest, The High Mountains of Portugal. Life of Pi was adapted for the silver screen by Ang Lee, garnering four Oscars. Martel also ran a guerilla book club with Stephen Harper, sending the former prime minister of Canada a book every two weeks for four years. The letters that accompanied the books were published as 101 Letters to a Prime Minister. Martel lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with the writer Alice Kuipers, and their four children.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Canongate Books Ltd; New Edition (17 May 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 319 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 184195392X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1841953922
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.9 x 2.1 x 19.8 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 1,107,010 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 91,667 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- 95,598 in Contemporary Fiction (Books)

Customer reviews:
4.3 18,737 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Yann Martel

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction

Yann Martel, the son of diplomats, was born in Spain in 1963. He grew up in Costa Rica, France, Mexico, Alaska, and Canada and as an adult has spent time in Iran, Turkey, and India. After studying philosophy in college, he worked at various odd jobs until he began earning his living as a writer at the age of twenty-seven. He lives in Montreal.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

18,737 global ratings

5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all customer images

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from United Kingdom

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

G. Ritchie

Quality

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 August 2023

Excellent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 June 2023

Verified Purchase

My edition of the Life of Pi arrived promptly. Excellent "like new" condition. The pages are unmarked and book cover perfect.

Helpful

Ralph Blumenau

Doesn't quite come off as a parable

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 January 2013

Verified Purchase

The Indian narrator's father was so enamoured of swimming pools that he named his son Piscine, which unfortunately lent itself to the kind of mispronunciation with which the boy's schoolmates mocked him. So when he moved to his secondary school, he firmly announced that his name was Pi.

Pi's father ran a huge zoo in Pondicherry in the 1970s. The narrator gives a thought-provoking defence of well-run zoos and an attack on the "myth" that animals are "freer" in the wild. His father warns his children against anthropomorphizing animals, and always to remember that, however cuddly they may be as youngsters, they are almost all potential killers or maimers if you approach the adults as if they liked you as much as you liked them. And there are many other words of wisdom about what animals need and what they fear, and how a good zoo keeper will understand that.

From infancy Pi grew up steeped, first in the sounds, sights and smells of Hinduism and then its teaching, one of whose remarkable qualities it is that it there is room in it for all gods of all religions, including Christianity. The adolescent Pi himself, despite his misgivings about how unlike the Christian and the Muslim God is to the gods of Hinduism, recognizes that, in their pure form, these religions, like that of the Hindus, teach Love, and he embraces them all together, worshipping in temple, church and mosque - to the anger of their presiding clerics when they find out, and to the perplexity of his "modern" father.

All this takes up the first quarter of the book - no hint yet of the shipwreck and the lifeboat together with the tiger, which is what the cover of the book and the film suggest the book is really all about.

Pi's father found Mrs Gandhi's rule intolerable, and decided that the family should emigrate to Canada. He would ship the animals across the Pacific with them with a view to selling them on arrival and starting a new life. The Japanese cargo ship goes down in a storm, and only Pi, the tiger, a zebra, an orang-outang and a hyena survive and share a life-boat. The story now for the most part loses its philosophical content and becomes an well-told and long (in my opinion over-long) "adventure" one about survival at sea. The latter three animals don't make it - the details are horrific - and in the end Pi shares the boat with the tiger. The danger that the tiger will make a meal of Pi is slowly transformed into a less terrifying coexistence, partly because Pi really knows a lot about animals. He is also avery practical sixteen-year-old and he learns fast, and is only occasionally lamed by fear or sorrow. At times he briefly reflects philosophically: against the infinite sea and the infinite sky, he reflects that his suffering was finite and insignificant. He survived an astonishing 227 days. When he and the tiger are at the point of death, they are restored to life in a totally surreal episode in which the strains of incredulity under which the story has laboured all the while finally snaps.

Since the story is told in the first person singular, I am not giving away anything when I say that he survived to tell his story to the representatives of the Japanese shipping company. They don't believe his story, which doesn't fit in with anything in their experience; so, after making some philosophical points about rejecting ideas that do not fall within our experience, he tells them another one which they find more credible because - they realize - it substitutes human beings for the animals in the life-boat.

Many of the stimulus questions in the appendix point towards the religious elements of the novel; but I think that after the first promising quarter, that strand was too thin for the adventure to be a kind of parable, and I cannot quite share the enthusiasm with which the book has been received.

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Dyl

A great story beautifully written

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 January 2013

Verified Purchase

I only bought this book because it was 20p and was supposed to be good. I really wasn't expecting to like it much. The fact that it had won awards planted a thought in my head that it was going to be a load of arty farty gibberish, that was too clever and fancy for the average person to enjoy. However, if that turned out to be the case then I had only lost 20p and a small amount of time.
Then I started reading it.

My opinion was slowly changed over the first few chapters. This book is beautifully written without being pretentious. The author describes scenes and events in a way that makes them easy to imagine and worth picturing in your mind as though you were there. Often a film will outdo a book on the fact that it can show beautiful scenery that can't easily be described in words. If that is the case here then I can't wait to see the film because to outdo the imagery possible from this book it will need to be spectacular.
The first third of the book builds up the character of Piscine (Pi) and often goes into details of religion. It never goes so far as to preach in any way though. It doesn't say that any one religion is, overall, better than any other. It is even funny when an argument breaks out regarding the subject. I am atheist but I am also fascinated by religion so maybe that was why I didn't find this section of the story boring. I can, however, see why some people would and would only urge them to persevere because the book picks up considerably afterwards.

The idea of a boy being stranded on a lifeboat with a tiger and a few other animals sounds ridiculous. That someone could write a book based on this event and make it interesting is almost unbelievable. How can you write so much about such a small group of characters trapped in a miniscule almost featureless setting and keep people from falling asleep? I had wondered whether all of the animals would start talking because I went into this book with no idea of how the characters interacted with each other. The answer again lies in the authors ability to describe everything so amazingly well. Whether it is about the confines and yet territorially broken up small boat, the vast emptiness of the ocean, the beauty and terror of the weather, the despair of being alone, the elation of discovering a way to continue surviving, or the fear of, and respect for, a 450 pound tiger, it is stunningly written.

Different people will interpret the words in different ways too. Some will read it is an adventure with a bit of survival ingenuity thrown in; some might read it as a kind of spiritual journey giving events a religious meaning; others could interpret it as a view of life itself. The way it is written means that there will be different parts where readers suddenly think, "Ahhhh! So that's what the author is trying to say." I personally had my moment of realisation, (I won't say at what point), and saw it as an interpretation of life. Everyone has there own little area in a vast world, with their own hopes and fears, their own limited provisions, their own moments of suddenly working out how to do something, their own loneliness and their own dark times and light times. You may read it and find some other explanation. That is what this book does. It leaves you to make up your mind, and it does it not out of laziness. Some readers have been disappointed by the ending. I thought it was great. In one respect it answered everything and yet, in another respect, left me wondering about whether it was a definite answer or not.

Life of Pi falls into a small group of things that are surprising in their brilliance. The film "Buried" is another, where the director managed to make ninety minutes of a man in a buried coffin with just a lighter and a phone compulsive viewing. Another film, "Lebanon", is similar. The entire film is viewed from the confines of a tank with its four occupants trying to get away from trouble after taking a wrong turn. In a similar, but also unique way, Life of Pi also turns a cramped scene into a fantastic story. Those who read this book will remember it for a long time afterwards. It has certainly gone down as one of the greatest books I have ever read.

Stunning! The best 20p I am ever likely to spend.

25 people found this helpful

Helpful

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs	AbeBooks Books, art & collectables	ACX Audiobook Publishing Made Easy	Amazon Web Services Scalable Cloud Computing Services

Audible Download Audiobooks	Book Depository Books With Free Delivery Worldwide	DPReview Digital Photography	Goodreads Book reviews & recommendations

Amazon Home Services Experienced pros Happiness Guarantee	IMDb Movies, TV & Celebrities	Kindle Direct Publishing Indie Digital & Print Publishing Made Easy	Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands

Amazon Warehouse Deep Discounts Open-Box Products	Amazon Business Service for business customers	Whole Foods Market We Believe in Real Food

Follow the author

Life of Pi Paperback – 17 May 2003

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Product description

Review

About the Author

Product details

About the author

Yann Martel

Customer reviews

Reviews with images

Top reviews from United Kingdom

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.