Giraffe

One of the strangest, most beautiful novels you'll ever read, Giraffe bears comparison with the fiction of Sebald and Kundera

Giraffe is rich, difficult to describe...blade-sharp imagery...Giraffe is important as a work of art. It will probably change your life and if it does it will be for the better

Giraffe is a work of obvious passion and great skill

An outstanding debut, sparking with ideas and poetic qualities

[P]oetic, multilayered prose...the strangeness of the giraffes' short-lived "migration'' to Czechoslovakia, Ledgard has found an effective symbol for what he calls "the brief communist moment''

There's plenty to like in Legard's novel: not least the wondrous, and gentle, giraffes

The writing lies between poetry and prose... Beautifully written

A deeply eccentric novel, often beautifully written, with a haunting atmosphere

J.M. Ledgard was born on the Shetland Islands, Scotland, in 1968, and educated in England, Scotland and America. He has been a foreign correspondent for the Economist since 1995. He divides his time between Europe and Africa.

In 1975, on the eve of May Day, secret police sealed off a zoo in a small Czechoslovakian town and ordered the destruction of the largest captive herd of giraffes in the world. 
 
Ledgard tells the story of the giraffes from the moment of their capture in Africa to their deaths behind the Iron Curtain. We see them first through the eyes of Emil, a haemodynamicist (he studies blood flow in vertical creatures) who is chosen to accompany them from Hamburg into Czechoslovakia. There Amina, a sleepwalker, a factory girl, glimpses their arrival and goes each day to gaze up at them. She is with them at the end, blinding them with a torch, as Jiri, a sharpshooter, brings them down one by one. 
 
Giraffe is a story about strangeness, about creatures that are alien. It is also a story about captivity, about Czechoslovakia, a middling totalitarian state in the middle of Europe that is itself asleep, under a spell, a nation of sleepwalkers.

J M Ledgard

In a room with no windows on the eastern coast of Africa, an Englishman, James More, is held captive by jihadist fighters. 
 
Thousands of miles away on the Greenland Sea, Danielle Flinders prepares to dive in a submersive to the ocean floor. 
 
In their confines they are drawn back to the Christmas of the previous year, where a chance encounter on a beach in France led to an intense and enduring romance...

J M Ledgard

Submergence

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