The White Bone

"A brilliantly inspired melding of research into the lives of African elephants and the creation of a distinctly original . . . alternative world." —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

In The White Bone, a novel imagined entirely from the perspective of African elephants, Barbara Gowdy creates a world whole and separate that illuminates our own.


For years, young Mud and her family have roamed the high grasses, swamps, and deserts of the sub-Sahara. Now the earth is scorched by drought, and the mutilated bodies of family and friends lie scattered on the ground, shot down by ivory hunters. Nothing—not the once familiar terrain, or the age-old rhythms of life, or even memory itself—seems reliable anymore. Yet a slim prophecy of hope is passed on from water hole to water hole: the sacred white bone of legend will point the elephants toward the Safe Place. And so begins a quest through Africa's vast and perilous plains—until at last the survivors face a decisive trial of loyalty and courage.


In The White Bone, Barbara Gowdy performs a feat of imagination unparalleled in modern fiction. Plunged into an alien landscape, we orient ourselves in elephant time, elephant space, elephant consciousness and begin to feel, as Gowdy puts it, "what it would be like to be that big and gentle, to be that imperiled, and to have that prodigious memory."


"An astonishingly moving saga." —Kirkus Reviews

"Gowdy renders this arid African landscape with a subtle gorgeousness reminiscent of Isak Dinesen." —The Boston Globe

"Gowdy here performs her greatest creative feat yet." —Entertainment Weekly

"Gowdy [has a] great gift for sensual description." —Sarah Boxer, The New York Times Book Review