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When Ruth Padel saw an advert for a cheap break to India, she decided to visit what she had always wanted to see: tropical jungle and a wildlife sanctuary. Her impromptu trip was the start of a remarkable two-year journey in search of that most elusive and beautiful animal: the tiger.
Armed with her granny’s opera glasses and a pair of Tunisian trainers, she sets off across Asia to ask the question: can the tiger be saved from extinction in the wild? Plunging into leech-infested jungles, she tracks tigers by jeep, by elephant and on foot, from Bangladesh to Bhutan, from China to far-east Russia. The result is a unique blend of natural history, travel literature and memoir, and an intimate portrait of an animal we have loved and feared almost to destruction.
Armed with her granny’s opera glasses and a pair of Tunisian trainers, she sets off across Asia to ask the question: can the tiger be saved from extinction in the wild? Plunging into leech-infested jungles, she tracks tigers by jeep, by elephant and on foot, from Bangladesh to Bhutan, from China to far-east Russia. The result is a unique blend of natural history, travel literature and memoir, and an intimate portrait of an animal we have loved and feared almost to destruction.
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Reviews
There are few women writing non-fiction today with such a sophisticated understanding of language, such a nuanced approach to style, and such a brazen willingness to engage with the big issues, personal and political. This is a gripping and informative book, always intriguing and occasionally dazzling
Thrilling and surprising . . . her prose has an intense, lush quality . . . She has an adventurer's intrepid spirit and a poet's eye for detail and ear for dialogue
Ruth Padel is a wonderful writer and she has produced perhaps the best book ever written on the places where tigers live
An extraordinary travel-memoir . . . this is no mere gutsy travelogue, but a poet's attempt to do what a scientist does: "saying precisely what and how you saw" . . . utterly compelling