Conville & Walsh
literary agency
Tigers in Red Weather
- Authors: Ruth Padel
- Category: Non-fiction
- Publisher: Little, Brown(UK)
- Pub date: 23 June 2005
- Length: 448 pages
About Tigers in Red Weather
‘Sheer linguistic genius, with images of a peculiar powerful beauty’
— Maggie O’Farrell, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
‘I love Ruth Padel. She is sexy, strong, rhythmic, passionate, fully alive and a whiz with words’
— Jeanette Winterson, THE TIMES
‘Ruth Padel combines two major gifts. She is a distinguished poet and a quite exceptional reader of the poetry of others: add to this a delightful skill in explanation, the instinct of a caring, clear-sighted guide to how poetry works and why it matters… she has a wealth of insight’
— George Steiner
TIGERS IN RED WEATHER will be Ruth Padel’s first work of narrative non-fiction and, as such, excited considerable interest when auctioned in the UK. At a surface level, it is about tigers – wild tigers – but more deeply this is a book about loss, and surviving it. For at the time when Ruth Padel fell out of love and ended a great love affair she found herself impelled to travel the globe, seeking out the last remaining places where tigers cling on in the wild and venturing alone in pursuit of them: to some 14 countries ranging from Bhutan and Siberia to the jungles of Sumatra and the Sundarbans in India. TIGERS IN RED WEATHER has thus become a book about extinction and survival; and about how and why we value the wildness outside and around us, as well as in ourselves.
The tiger is the beautiful top predator, an ‘umbrella species’. If we can’t save this, can we save ourselves? What would our world be, without wild animals? Why do we care for the ‘wild’ – or for losing it? What does wild mean, to us? And what, therefore, does it mean to be free of a personal relationship that had begun to be a trap?