Loot
A novel
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- USD 10.99
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- USD 10.99
Descripción editorial
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION • A spellbinding historical novel set in the eighteenth century: a hero’s quest, a love story, the story of a young artist coming of age, and an exuberant heist adventure that traces the bloody legacy of colonialism across two continents and fifty years.
A Best Book of the Year: The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NPR, Kirkus Reviews
“Addictively absorbing.” —The New York Times Book Review
This wildly inventive, irresistible feat of storytelling from a writer at the height of her powers is "an expertly-plotted, deeply affecting novel about war, displacement, emigration, and an elusive mechanical tiger" (Maggie O’Farrell, best-selling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait).
Abbas is just seventeen years old when his gifts as a woodcarver come to the attention of Tipu Sultan, and he is drawn into service at the palace in order to build a giant tiger automaton for Tipu’s sons, a gift to commemorate their return from British captivity. His fate—and the fate of the wooden tiger he helps create—will mirror the vicissitudes of nations and dynasties ravaged by war across India and Europe.
Working alongside the legendary French clockmaker Lucien du Leze, Abbas hones his craft, learns French, and meets Jehanne, the daughter of a French expatriate. When Du Leze is finally permitted to return home to Rouen, he invites Abbas to come along as his apprentice. But by the time Abbas travels to Europe, Tipu’s palace has been looted by British forces, and the tiger automaton has disappeared. To prove himself, Abbas must retrieve the tiger from an estate in the English countryside, where it is displayed in a collection of plundered art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
James (The Tusk That Did the Damage) returns with a spectacular tale of creativity and colonialism drawing on the "Tippoo's Tiger" automaton displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 1794 Mysore, India, teenager Abbas carves intricate mechanical toys at his father's furniture shop. After Mysore's ruler, Tipu Sultan, learns of Abbas's talents, he orders Abbas to help French inventor and clockmaker Lucien du Leze craft Mysore's first automaton. Their "fantastical curiosity," as Tipu calls the life-size wooden tiger capable of sound and movement, pleases the court. While under du Leze's tutelage, Abbas meets Jehanne Martine, the biracial daughter of Tipu's French armorer. Du Leze, Jehanne, and her father sail to France in 1799, and Abbas stays behind to tend his ailing father. His hopes to follow them are dashed by Britain's bloody conquest of Mysore, and by the time he arrives in Rouen in 1805 to take up the apprenticeship he's been promised, du Leze is dead. He reunites with Jehanne, who tells him the British have shipped the mechanical tiger to England with other looted artifacts. Abbas proposes an audacious plan to reclaim the object, believing its public display could make them rich and give them the chance to make their mark on history. There's an unceasing exuberance to the prose, and James's descriptions are endlessly witty (du Leze's outfit for the tiger's unveiling, an Afghani tunic and a shawl from Kashmir, is "an atlas of textiles"). Rarely is a novel so dense with painful themes also such fun. At once swashbuckling and searing, this is a marvelous achievement.
