PRAISE FOR The White Bone

"Gowdy's chief accomplishment is that she manages genuinely to entrench us in the elephant psyche...Dazzling.... Gowdy renders this arid African landscape with a subtle gorgeousness reminiscent of Isak Dineson."

--Donna Bailey Nurse, The Boston Globe

"Richly and precisely contextualized...Readers anticipating a scientifically accuarate document should brace themselves for Gowdy's artistry...THE WHITE BONE is a spectacular achievement."

--Abby Frucht, Chicago Tribune

"Gowdy here performs her greatest creative feat yet.... Gowdy conjures a vibrantly visceral world.... THE WHITE BONE presents a lyrical educated guess on what elephant consciousness might feel like - including, most sadly and movingly, the perpetual threat of extinction. [An] A."

--Megan Harlan, Entertainment Weekly

"Fascinating...Through the course of THE WHITE BONE we come to care about the elephants as much as we would humans."

--Judy Doenges, The Seattle Times

"Written like an indigenous legend, THE WHITE BONE is about the burden of memory...Readers who make it through will never think the same of elephants and their 'appalling resilience.'"

--Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today

"A richly detailed novel."

--New York Daily News

"Brave...Gowdy has embarked on the creation of an extremely distinct, invented world, with its own social and linguistic structures, its own myths and totems."

--Claire Messud, Newsday

"Gowdy brilliantly imbues these uncommon characters with wrenching emotions."

--Natasha Stovall, The Village Voice Literary Supplement

"From the enormously gifted Gowdy, a mesmerizing journey....Warmly conveying a remarkably full vision of elephant life, as well as the almost incomprehensible tragedy of species annihilation, Gowdy has created an astonishingly moving saga." Kirkus Reviews

"[D]espite her great skill and the colossal effort of imaginative empathy it must have entailed, [Gowdy's] book is hard going....Without being overly anthropomorphic, Gowdy manages to individualize a number of [elephants] as having human-scale emotions, even humor....[T]he reader is disappointed that so talented a writer could have exerted so much effort on so unpromising a subject." Publishers Weekly

"[A] novel for only the most imaginative readers, or at least those who are willing to accept elephants as sardonic and lascivious." Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today

"Gowdy is a strong and sympathetic writer, capable of conveying real emotion even in the most removed of settings. In this way, we can inhabit the world of her heroine, Mud....We can momentarily understand, in the wake of an elephant massacre, what it might be like to lose 23 members of your family rather than just one, and how it might feel to move from place to place in search of sanctuary." Alex Clark, The Guardian (U.K.)

"[A] big religious put-on, an elephantine Pilgrim's Progress....[T]he novel is plenty funny and plenty odd....Gowdy [has a] great gift for parody and [an] even greater gift for sensual, gross-out description." Sarah Boxer, The New York Times Book Review

"The mysticism and majesty of the African elephant loses no honor in Gowdy's new novel....This masterfully crafted novel is highly recommended for all libraries." Library Journal

"[Gowdy] did quite a bit of research and does provide views of how elephants live. It is a bit disjointed and often hard to keep track of the various elephants since they all seem to have two names. Detailed family trees are given, along with a glossary and a map of the area." KLIATT

Plunged into an alien landscape, readers orient themselves in elephant time, elephant space, and elephant consciousness, and begin to feel, as Gowdy puts it, "what it would be like to be that big and gentle, to be that imperiled, and to have that prodigious memory".

Barbara Gowdy is the author of five previous books, including MISTER SANDMAN and WE SO SELDOM LOOK ON LOVE, and she has twice been a finalist for both the Governor General's Award and the Giller Prize. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.