Walt and Judy's happiness has been blighted by their childlessness; although their marriage seems blissful, Judy feels increasingly empty and Walt longs to make her happy again. So one day he brings home Looee - a baby chimpanzee. Looee, exuberant and demanding, immediately fills the gap in Walt and Judy's life, and they come to love him as their own son. Like any child, Looee is affectionate and quick to learn, generous and engaging. But he is also a deeply unpredictable animal, and one night their unique family life is changed forever.
At the Girdish Institute, chimpanzees have been studied for decades to prove that they are political, altruistic, often angry but also capable of forgiveness. The chimps at the Institute travel a parallel path to Looee's; they experience friendship, loss and rivalry, just as he does. When these two paths meet, startling truths are revealed about all great apes, captive and free, beloved or abandoned.
Told alternately from the perspective of humans and chimpanzees, A Beautiful Truth is a profound and gripping story about the things we hold sacred and the truths of nature we so often ignore.
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 9781847088505
Number of pages: 386
Weight: 214 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 19 mm
Audacious and unsettling... McAdam's prose binds into a luminous, flashing reverie of primate existence... Remarkable - Lucien Robsinson, TLS
A vivid, impressionistic and often harrowing portrait of the relationship between people and chimps... Beautifully strange and thought-provoking; its truth is elusive as well as beautiful - David Evans, Independent on Sunday
McAdam has a poetic, impressionistic style and sense of humour, and the resulting fantasy is convincing and strangely melancholy - Globe and Mail
[This book] really does ask what it is to be human, with unsettling results - Claire Lowden, Sunday Times
A sure-handed and mature work, expertly weaving together shifts in voice and point of view and making use of a poetic language full of direct, sensual metaphors - Toronto Star
Remarkable... In the genre of primate fiction, chimpanzees are used to satirize man's pretensions to superiority... The transformative difference [here] is that its chimps aren't metaphors or tools for parody but faithfully described individuals... [It is] is both disarmingly familiar and richly, movingly strange - Wall Street Journal
Packs a huge emotional punch. McAdam has effected a true leap of empathy, and in the process pulled off something often claimed to the point of cliché but very rarely achieved in fiction: He makes us see the world and ourselves in a new way - Montreal Gazette
A serious, thoughtful piece of work - Anthony Cummins, Telegraph
I was utterly devastated by [this book] - Eleanor Catton, Guardian
Some beautiful prose... [An] admirable message - Doug Johnstone, Independent on Sunday
[A] gut punch of a novel... This is a book that's going to get a lot of people talking. And crying - Toronto Life
Colin McAdam writes with remarkable sensitivity and intuition... Heartbreaking - Washington Post
An odd and strangely sad story about love, nature and humanity - Kate Saunders, The Times
Haunting. Heartbreaking. A Curious George for grown-ups, it is a tale of empathy and honesty, deftly told and beautifully rendered - Will Ferguson, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author, 419
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, The Disappeared
Compelling - Erikka Askeland, Scotsman
Deeply moving - Thespec.com
Somber [and] poetic - Cleveland.com
Thought-provoking - Huffington Post
Lingers long after it is read - Washington Post
Brilliantly riffing on the apeness of humans and vice versa, the beautiful truth of McAdam's novel is complex, subtle and intensely moving - Guardian
An illuminating and touching portrait - Fraya McClements, Irish Times
Illuminating and touching - The Irish Times
Please sign in to write a review
Would you like to proceed to the App store to download the Waterstones App?