The High Mountains of Portugal

The author of the bestselling Life of Pi returns to the storytelling power and luminous wisdom of his master novel. The High Mountains of Portugal is a story about love, loss, and faith that take us on a mesmerizing journey through the last century. Told in three intersecting narratives--part quest, part ghost story, part contemporary realism--the novel begins in the early 1900s, when a young man named Tomás discovers in the archives of Lisbon an ancient journal describing an extraordinary artifact that he believes will challenge the church's understanding of religion forever and sets out for the High Mountains of Portugal in search of it. Thirty-five years later, a pathologist devoted to the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie is drawn into the consequences of Tomás's quest as he finds himself at the center of a murder story. And fifty years after that, Senator Peter Tovy of Ottawa, grieving the death of his beloved wife, rescues a chimpanzee from an Oklahoma research facility and takes it to live with him in his ancestral village in northern Portugal, where the strands of all three stories come together. Filled with tenderness, humor, and endless surprise, Yann Martel's new novel offers a haunting exploration of great love and great loss, asking questions about faith and the lack of faith that are at the heart of all his novels. From the Hardcover edition.