Synopses & Reviews
Just why do humpback whales sing? That's the question that has marine behavioral biologist Nate Quinn and his crew poking, charting, recording, and photographing very big, wet, gray marine mammals. Until the extraordinary day when a whale lifts its tail into the air to display a cryptic message spelled out in foot-high letters: Bite me.
Trouble is, Nate's beginning to wonder if he hasn't spent just a little too much time in the sun. 'Cause no one else on his team saw a thing — not his longtime partner, Clay Demodocus; not their saucy young research assistant; not even the spliff-puffing white-boy Rastaman Kona (neé Preston Applebaum). But later, when a roll of film returns from the lab missing the crucial tail shot — and his research facility is trashed — Nate realizes something very fishy indeed is going on.
By turns witty, irreverent, fascinating, puzzling, and surprising, Fluke is Christopher Moore at his outrageous best.
Review
"Moore is endlessly inventive in his description of the rubbery, watery world of Goo, and his characters are perfectly calibrated, part credible human beings and part clever caricatures. This cetacean picaresque is no fluke it is a sure winner." Publishers Weekly
Review
"One of the finest pieces of imagination since Anatole France's Penguin Island or George Orwell's Animal Farm." Denver Post
Review
"If the ghost of Jules Verne had conspired with Rudy Rucker and Tom Robbins to produce a novel, Fluke might very well make them hang their heads in defeat." Washington Post Book World
Review
"Humor that seamlessly blends lunacy with larceny....Habit-forming zaniness." USA Today
Review
"Hilarious, educational, and original....It is difficult to put the book down, for there are astonishing new developments on every page." BookPage
Review
"Wonderfully strange and fall-down funny as always, Moore delivers, with moxie and wit, a satisfying collage of science, magic, comedy, fantasy, and Save the Whales propaganda." San Diego Union-Tribune
Review
"You're not likely to stumble across another book like [Fluke]....This cetacean picaresque is no fluke it's a sure winner." San Francisco Book Review
Synopsis
“Readers new to the work of Christopher Moore will want to know two things immediately. First: Where has this guy been hiding? (Answer: In plain sight, since he has a cult following.)... H]e writes laid back fables straight out of Margaritaville, on the cusp of humor and science fiction.”--Janet Maslin, New York Times
Whale researcher Nathan Quinn has a problem. It's not a new problem; in fact, it's been around for nearly 20 million years. And Nate's spent most of his adult life working to solve it. You see, although everybody (well, almost everybody) knows that humpback whales sing (outside of human composition, the most complex songs on the planet) no one knows why. Nate, a Ph.D. in behavior biology, intends to discover the answer to this burning question--and soon.
Every winter he and Clay Demolocus, his partner in the Maui Whale Research Foundation, ply the warm waters between the islands of Maui and Lanai, recording the eerily beautiful songs of the humpbacks and returning to their lab for electronic analysis. The trouble is, Nate's beginning to wonder if he hasn't spent just a little too much time in the sun. Either that, or he's losing his mind. Because today, as he was shooting an I.D. photo of a humpback tail fluke, Nate could've sworn he saw the words “Bite Me” scrawled across the whale's tail. . .
Synopsis
In his wacky new whale tale, Moore "writes in laid back fables straight out of Margaritaville, on the cusp of humor and science fiction." --Janet Maslin, "New York Times."
About the Author
Christopher Moore is the author of thirteen previous novels: Practical Demonkeeping, Coyote Blue, Bloodsucking Fiends, Island of the Sequined Love Nun, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, Lamb, Fluke, The Stupidest Angel, A Dirty Job, You Suck, Fool, and Sacré Bleu. He lives in San Francisco.
Kids Q&A
Listen to an interview with Christopher Moore