From “a writer of remarkable gifts,” “Borges with emotional weight, comes a tale that is at once a fantastical historical mystery, a haunting love story, and a glimpse into the uncanny—the quest for a long-lost book detailing the animals left off Noah’s Ark. Xeno Atlas grows up in the Bronx, his Sicilian grandmother’s strange stories of animal spirits his only escape from the legacy of his mother’s early death and his stern father’s long absences as a common seaman. Shunted off to an isolated boarding school, with his father’s activities abroad and the source of his newfound wealth grown increasingly mysterious, Xeno turns his early fascination with animals into a personal obsession: his search for the Caravan Bestiary. This medieval text, lost for eight hundred years, supposedly details the animals not granted passage on the Ark—griffins, hippogriffs, manticores, and basilisks—the vanished remnants of a lost world sometimes glimpsed in the shadowy recesses of our own. Xeno’s quest takes him from the tenements of New York to the jungles of Vietnam to the ancient libraries of Europe—but it is only by riddling out his own family secrets that he can hope to find what he is looking for. A story of panoramic scope and intellectual suspense, The Bestiary is ultimately a tale of heartbreak and redemption. The Bestiary , Nicholas Christopher's fifth novel-after Franklin Flyer (2002) and A Trip to the Stars (2000)-has more than a little in common with Dan Brown's hugely popular The Da Vinci Code: the plots of both books are driven by a search for a lost object whose disappearance involves significant religious and historical intrigue. But The Bestiary is no mere Da Vinci knockoff. As the Washington Post opines, by blurring the edges of fantasy and reality, "Christopher is doing something strange here-and tantalizing." The novel's exploration of magical realism is what sets it apart, and its depiction of Xeno's enchanting, melancholy journey from Paris to Venice to Vietnam as he discovers beasts and himself is both riveting and heartwarming. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. Influenced by his grandmother's fanciful bedtime stories, punctuated by realistic animal sounds, Xeno Atlas is fascinated by animal lore and mythological beasts. A lonely boy stuck in a dysfunctional-mold-breaking family—a dead mother, an estranged uncle, a shape-shifting grandmother, and an uncommunicative, absentee father—Xeno eschews childhood pastimes, pursuing instead scholarly clues to an ancient Caravan Bestiary: an illuminated record of animals denied passage on Noah's Ark. Over time, Xeno increasingly identifies with these misunderstood, extinct, and imaginary animals (even creating some of his own), preferring dragons and hippogryphs to beastly humans. His adult travels take him full circle to his Cretan ancestral roots and to unexpected answers, finally tying up the story's vexatious loose ends. Despite the author's signature use of magic realism, tantalizing references to a rich spiritual plane, a wounded hero, and a lost manuscript, the novel's potential falls somewhat flat under the weight of its leisurely pace and overabundant detail, lacking the emotive power of Byatt's Possession or the atmospheric tension of Zafon's Shadow of the Wind. Still, readers of those and similar works will find some satisfaction here. Baker, Jennifer “Smart, entertaining ... a marvelous hybrid of intellectual quest and well-plotted adventure.... A literary thriller in which—unusually—neither “literary” nor “thriller” seems an afterthought.”— Kirkus Reviews “The novel's greatest pleasures might lie in its esoterica, its fascinating trips down side paths of the fantastic.” — Columbus Dispatch “A fascinating blend of the bibliophile quest novel merged with romance, intrigue and fantasy.”— Seattle Times “Fascinating ... an old-fashioned quest.... Christopher is a compelling storyteller and writer.”— Boston Globe “Magical and melancholy ... richly drawn .”— Washington Post Book World Nicholas Christopher is the author of four previous novels, The Soloist, Veronica , A Trip to the Stars, and Franklin Flyer , eight books of poetry, and a book about film noir, Somewhere in the Night . He lives in New York City. Reviewed by Ron Charles Long before we became experts at driving animals to extinction, we were desperate to record their existence. Naming the animals was the only work Adam did in Paradise, which suggests something about the fundamental pleasure we still get from identifying creatures. The most ancient paintings in the world show bison and mammoths cavorting. Herodotus, Aristotle and Pliny the Elder produced wide-ranging works of natural history. By the 12th century, Europe was gaga over bestiaries: lavishly illustrated books that described all the known animals, along with mystical creatures, such as the sphinx, the griffin and the chimera. Medieval authors assigned various moral and allegorical significance to ea