The Lastling

Fourteen-year-old Paris is thrilled when her rich, influential uncle Franklin decides to take her on a trip to the Himalayas. She hopes this will be her chance to prove just how mature and worthy of his company she is. But this will be no pleasure trip. Franklin and his friends are searching for rare and endangered species, and they travel deep into the war-ravaged forest to find them. There they come across Tahr, a twelve-year-old monk who has just seen a shocking vision—the face of a creature known before only in legends . . . and one that Franklin is determined to capture alive.
Set in an exotic land wracked by violence, cruelty, and a threatened ecosystem, this edgy and strikingly original novel offers a riveting look at morality and the harshness of nature—both human and otherwise.

Fourteen-year-old Paris is thrilled when her rich, influential uncle Franklin decides to take her on a trip to the Himalayas. She hopes this will be her chance to prove just how mature and worthy of his company she is. But this will be no pleasure trip. Franklin and his friends are searching for rare and endangered species, and they travel deep into the war-ravaged forest to find them. There they come across Tahr, a twelve-year-old monk who has just seen a shocking vision—the face of a creature known before only in legends . . . and one that Franklin is determined to capture alive.
Set in an exotic land wracked by violence, cruelty, and a threatened ecosystem, this edgy and strikingly original novel offers a riveting look at morality and the harshness of nature—both human and otherwise.

Children's Literature

The British poet Philip Gross's first young adult novel to appear in the United States is a riveting eco-adventure bordering on horror. Two lives intersect in the Himalayas, that of fourteen-year-old Paris--wealthy, spoiled, and blase beyond her years--and the twelve-year-old Buddhist monk, Tahr. Paris's equally blase, eccentric Uncle Franklin has invited her along on a hunting trip with his "Ultimate Diner's Club," a group of vacationing journalists and cooks under the care of tough native guards and a killer dog. Tahr is seeking sanctuary after the death of his master. From the moment he stumbles into the obscenely rich Europeans' hidden camp, Paris's real education begins. Add to the mix, guerrilla warfare and the truly ultimate species on the edge of extinction, and chaos breaks loose. The unworldly Tahr and the jaded Paris must band together for their own survival and that of their new friend, Geng-sun. Violence just keeps on escalating in this tale of ever-renewing cultural clashes in a cold and treacherous land. It's quite a page turner.

Philip Gross is a poet whose work has won several prizes; his collection THE WASTING GAME was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize. He lives in Bristol, England, and teaches creative writing at Glamorgan University. THE LASTLING is his third novel, his first to be published by Clarion Books.