Mammoth

Author(s): Chris Flynn

Australian Fiction

The original, unforgettable and thought-provoking new novel by award-winning author Chris Flynn that will change how readers understand the world. Narrated by a 13,000-year-old extinct American mastodon, Mammoth is the (mostly) true story of how the skull of a Tyrannosaurus bataar, a pterodactyl, a prehistoric penguin, the severed hand of an Egyptian mummy and the narrator himself came to be on sale at a 2007 natural history auction in Manhattan. Ranging from the Pleistocene Epoch to nineteenth-century America and beyond, including detours to Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany, Mammoth illuminates a period of history when ideas about science and religion underwent significant change. By tracing how and when the fossils were unearthed, Mammoth traverses time and place to reveal humanity's role in the inexorable destruction of the natural world.


Product Information

Shortlisted for the Indie Book Award for Fiction 2021

Elizabeth Gilbert Author of City of Girls, The Signature of All Things and Eat, Pray, Love ‘Chris Flynn has written a brilliant, hilarious, and curiously moving novel, featuring one the best narrators in literary history and – without a doubt – the single best narrator in natural history. Why has nobody ever written a novel from the point of view of a mammoth’s skeleton before? Because nobody was ever smart enough to do it. I simply love this story.’ Christos Tsiolkas Author of Damascus, The Slap and Barracuda ‘Mammoth is astonishing, a novel that is by turns playful, uncomfortably excoriating, very funny and always deeply humane. The voice in Mammoth doesn’t sound like a voice I’ve ever heard before and for those of us who love books and reading this is the pleasure and the hope that we are always chasing. This novel delivers. It is both a requiem for lost worlds and lost time, and it is also a sheer joy.’ Thomas Keneally Author of Schindler’s Ark and Gossip from the Forest ‘Mammoth is an extraordinary gambit of the story-telling imagination of Chris Flynn, and a new way of listening to all the narratives of what we have supplanted. Mammoth is playful and serious, encapsulating the macro-history of all life in the tale of one species. I don’t think anyone else has quite done that.’

General Fields

  • : 9780702262746
  • : University of Queensland Press
  • : University of Queensland Press
  • : 0.344
  • : September 2019
  • : 1.9 Centimeters X 15.3 Centimeters X 22.5 Centimeters
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Chris Flynn
  • : Paperback
  • : 2020
  • : 823.4
  • : 265
  • : FV