Whistling for the Elephants

An eccentric cast of characters, human and animal, features in this first novel for adults by comic actress Toksvig. When eleven-year-old tomboy Dorothy Kane moves with her upper-class English parents to the small town of Sassaspaneck, New York, the result is bewilderment on every side. The Kanes are a family of "partial communicators", physically remote and emotionally vague: "I suppose a lot of people have never seen their father naked; I had never seen mine without a tie." Confronted with a 1960s America shaken by a war in Vietnam, by campaigns for civil rights and women's liberation, Dorothy's parents retreat into crisis, leaving her to pick her own, troubled way through the last, crucial summer of her childhood.

She receives help and inspiration from an unlikely source: a trio of women who live on the edge of town in a dilapidated zoo. Gradually she uncovers details of the zoo's flamboyant and tragic history, its origins in passion and extravagant wealth, the secrets and betrayals surrounding its decline. It is a history that touches the lives of all the people of Sassaspaneck. With Dorothy's help, old wounds are healed and new bonds forged, as the women of the town are drawn into a struggle to save the zoo from property developers--and to provide a new home for Artemesia, a tightrope-walking African elephant.

Whistling for the Elephants is a gently comic novel about transformation and the getting of wisdom; about finding the ways to make being a girl "just fine"; and about relearning from the animal kingdom those lessons of love and fidelity that human beings as a species are apt to forget. --Sarah Waters


Genre: General Fiction