Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2000
176 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
In the vast wilderness of Tasmania's plateau, the Tasmanian tiger - the thylacine - long thought extinct, has been spotted, sparking the imagination of the locals and drawing the dubious interests of outsiders. One of the latter is M, whose objective is to find the creature for a multinational biotech company. In The Hunter, author Julia Leigh tracks M's fateful course, from his base camp with a young family whose ranks were decimated by the wilderness, to the forests where M immerses himself in the tiger's world - reading footprints in the mud, covering his scent with animal dung. What begins as a business proposition takes on mythic aspects as M's quest becomes ever more obsessive, a search not for ultimate profit but for the essence of life that technology has all but crushed.
"Fans of Peter Matthiessen will find Leigh darker and sometimes less ambitious, but effective in similar ways, as M's obsession with the hunt drives this moody work by a gifted new author to its chilling conclusion." - Publishers Weekly.
"A very focused and absorbing debut novel." - Booklist.
"Has a predatory air about it .. a difficult, often mesmerizing piece of writing that, once it gets going, doesn't stop until it hits its target." - Los Angeles Times.
"[An] accomplished novel....feels, around the edges, like an exploration of an archaic manhood that may itself be teetering on extinction's brink." - The New York Times.
This information about The Hunter was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Julia Leigh is the author of internationally acclaimed novels, The Hunter (1999) and Disquiet (2008). Her film "Sleeping Beauty" was selected for Competition at the Festival de Cannes 2011.
Her most recent work is Avalanche, an autobiography. She lives in Sydney, Australia.
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