by Yann Martel · 2001
Piscine Molitor Patel, the teenage son of a Pondicherry zookeeper, survives the sinking of the cargo ship carrying his family and their animals to Canada, and finds himself adrift in a lifeboat on the Pacific with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Over 227 days at sea, he must invent the discipline and ingenuity to keep himself alive alongside a predator he cannot escape. Framed as a story told to a novelist years later, the book is as much a meditation on faith, storytelling, and which version of events we choose to believe as it is a survival tale.