Seven years after winning the
Man Booker Prize for “Life of Pi,” the global best seller about a shipwrecked Indian boy sharing a boat with a tiger, Yann Martel has sold a manuscript for his follow-up for around $3 million, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
After a monthlong auction Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of
Random House, one of the world’s largest publishers, bought the rights to publish Mr. Martel’s third novel, as yet untitled, in the United States sometime next year. Like “Life of Pi,” the new book is an allegory — this time about the Holocaust — involving animals. It relates the story of an encounter between a famous writer and a taxidermist who is writing a play that features dialogue between a donkey and a monkey, both imprinted on a shirt.
“I’ve noticed over the years of reading books on the Holocaust and seeing movies that it’s always represented in the same way, which is historical or social realism,” Mr. Martel, 46, said in a telephone interview from his home in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. “I was thinking that it was interesting that you don’t have many imaginative takes on it like
George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ and its take on Stalinism.”
