6.2 /10 1 Votes
Country Canada Publication date April 6, 2010 Preceded by Life of Pi Page count 224 Publisher Random House of Canada | 3.1/5 Goodreads Language English Pages 224 Originally published 6 April 2010 Genre Novel ISBN 0-307-39877-3 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Followed by The High Mountains of Portugal Similar Yann Martel books, Novels | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Beatrice and Virgil is Canadian writer Yann Martel's third novel. First published in April 2010, it contains an allegorical tale about representations of the Holocaust. It tells the story of Henry, a novelist, who receives the manuscript of a play in a letter from a reader. Intrigued, Henry traces the letter to a taxidermist, who introduces him to the play's protagonists, two taxidermy animals—Beatrice, a donkey, and Virgil, a monkey.
The Globe and Mail reported that Martel received a $2 million advance from Random House for U.S. rights alone, and that the total advance for worldwide rights was around $3 million, probably the highest ever advance for a single Canadian novel. Martel's earlier novel, Life of Pi, won the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and sold seven million copies worldwide.