Life of Pi, by Yann Martel

Life of Pi begins as a gripping and often surprisingly entertaining survival story and gradually becomes something stranger and more thought-provoking. Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel follows Pi Patel, a curious 16-year-old growing up in India, fascinated by both animals and religion and unwilling to accept that he must choose a single way of understanding the world.

After a shipwreck in the Pacific, Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat—apart from an improbable collection of animals that includes a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra, and eventually the companion who comes to define the novel: a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. What follows is months of hunger, fear, improvisation, and uneasy coexistence as Pi learns how to survive at sea while sharing a tiny territory with one of the world’s most dangerous predators. Martel keeps the story moving with a wonderful mix of suspense, ingenuity, absurdity, and humor, making Pi’s daily struggle for survival as entertaining as it is improbable.

The mechanics of that survival are compelling, but they are only part of what makes Life of Pi memorable. Pi is Hindu, Christian, and Muslim, and his overlapping beliefs become increasingly important as the familiar world disappears around him. Martel uses his ordeal to ask larger questions about faith and reason, about the stories people choose to believe, and about whether truth is always as straightforward as it seems.

By the novel’s end, the adventure has become something else entirely: a meditation on storytelling itself. Martel leaves readers with competing ways of understanding what they have just read—and with the unsettling possibility that the story we choose may reveal as much about us as it does about Pi. That lingering ambiguity is one reason Life of Pi remains such a fascinating novel, but it never loses sight of the fact that it is also a tremendously enjoyable story.

Explore more great books like this on the Travelreads list of the best travel novels.