A Beautiful Truth
Colin McAdam
ISBN: 9781616953157
Published: September, 2013
Pricing
Paperback $15.00
More books by Colin McAdam
Suggested Reading
Description
Told simultaneously from the perspective of humans and chimpanzees, set in a Vermont home and a Florida primate research facility, A Beautiful Truth—at times brutal, other times deeply moving—is about the simple truths that transcend species, the meaning of family, the lure of belonging, and the capacity for survival.
A p...
Told simultaneously from the perspective of humans and chimpanzees, set in a Vermont home and a Florida primate research facility, A Beautiful Truth—at times brutal, other times deeply moving—is about the simple truths that transcend species, the meaning of family, the lure of belonging, and the capacity for survival.
A powerful and haunting meditation on human nature told from the dual perspectives of a Vermont family that has adopted a chimp as a surrogate son, and a group of chimpanzees in a Florida research institute.
Looee, a chimp raised by a well-meaning and compassionate human couple who cannot conceive a baby of their own, is forever set apart. He’s not human, but with his peculiar upbringing he is no longer like other chimps. One tragic night Looee’s two natures collide and their unique family is forever changed.
At the Girdish Institute in Florida, a group of chimpanzees has been studied for decades. The work at Girdish has proven that chimps have memories and solve problems, that they can learn language and need friends, and that they build complex cultures. They are political, altruistic, get angry, and forgive. When Looee is moved to the Institute, he is forced to try to find a place in their world.
A Beautiful Truth is an epic and heartfelt story about parenthood, friendship, loneliness, fear and conflict, about the things we hold sacred as humans and how much we have in common with our animal relatives. A novel of great heart and wisdom from a literary master, it exposes the yearnings, cruelty, and resilience of all great apes.
Media
“McAdam teases and turns around language, giving us a creative and wondrous portrait of nonhuman society from the inside out.”
—Slate Editor's Selection for Favorite Books of 2013
“In prose both strange and startling, McAdam asks all the big questions; he answers with heartbreaking honesty. This is the kind of book you finish just to pick back up again, if only to figure out how he pulled it off.”
Winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
“Save the Chimps is honored to partner with Soho Press as they help educate animal lovers and everyone about chimpanzees. A BEAUTIFUL TRUTH does an amazing job at telling the stories of chimpanzees in captivity today and it also helps people understand why these amazing souls should be loved, respected, and protected in their natural habitat. We hope everyone reads this book and comes to see chimpanzees as we do.”
—Save the Chimps Executive Director Jo Sullivan on Soho Press' partnership with Save the Chimps
“If the book were simply the story of the Ribkes and Looee, A BEAUTIFUL TRUTH would still be a remarkable achievement. But the narrative’s radical other half, which unfolds in loosely alternate chapters and focuses on a group of chimpanzees in a Florida research institute, invoking their perspective, lends the novel a rare depth… McAdam’s acknowledgements attest to serious secondary reading—Frans de Waal and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh are both cited—but his depiction of simian life’s limitations turns research into rhapsodic lamentation.”
The Times Literary Supplement on A Beautiful Truth
“McAdam's language reaches into that mysterious place where a word ends and a feeling begins. A Beautiful Truth is a story about love and beauty and our dreams for our children and our inescapable loneliness. The characters, human and animal, are sad and honest and true. I could not put this novel down, and only when I finished it could I breathe again. ”
—Kim Echlin, author of The Disappeared
“A work of exquisite sensitivity and prowess, McAdams' tale is of two species astride not a divide but a continuum, of our longings and resiliencies and the fate we share: being stronger than we are evolved. ”
—Alex Shakar, author of Luminarium
“McAdam has a poetic, impressionistic style, and a sense of humour, and the resulting fantasy is convincing and strangely melancholy. ”
—Toronto Globe and Mail
“A BEAUTIFUL TRUTH manages to parlay long established and widely disseminated scientific and anthropological facts into gripping and thought-provoking fiction... ”
—The Miami Herald
“If A BEAUTIFUL TRUTH lingers long after it is read — and I promise you, it will — it’s because even as Looee becomes a son for Walt and Judy, he becomes for the rest of us a heartbreaking guide to how we treat our closest living relatives.”
Barbara J. King, author of How Animals Grieve, writing for the Washington Post on A BEAUTIFUL TRUTH
“My challenge was to find a way to articulate ape life without using gimmicks or talking chimps.”
Colin McAdam discussing A BEAUTIFUL TRUTH on Harper's Magazine
“McAdam has written an unforgettable book, one that, remarkably, had me thinking less about how human chimps can be, and more about what that word “human” even means.”