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Leopards prowl Christopher Ondaatje’s imagination much the way they stalk his books
Dark and mysterious symbols of power, beauty and stealth, they have inhabited the pages of his acclaimed The Man-Eater of Punanai, Sindh Revisited, Journey to the Source of the Nile, Hemingway in Africa and Woolf in Ceylon. Leopards have been both Ondaatje’s destiny and his talisman; he has crossed the globe to track them and the legends they leave in the darkness. The Glenthorne Cat compiles the 12 best stories about this legendary predator. There is the electrifying sensuality of a woman and a leopard in Anna Kazan’s “A Visit”; the shocking body count in Jim Corbett’s famous “The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag”; and a gripping, classic adventure tale by Honoré de Balzac. Ondaatje shares his own encounters with leopards in “The Glenthorne Cat,” a personal and ghostly account set in the author’s isolated Victorian mansion clinging to the edge of the Devonshire cliffs. From an unlikely British wood to the silent forests and teeming cities of India, Ceylon, Burma and other exotic locales, these fictional and true stories cross cultures and imaginations, united by their portrait of one of the most dangerous and unpredictable predators on earth. Graced with magnificent full-colour photographs, The Glenthorne Cat will appeal to all those captivated by the wonders of the animal kingdom and by superb storytelling. All of my life I have felt that the wildness of the world is never that far away. From the freedom of my early childhood in Ceylon to the stuffy boardrooms of the Canadian business world, I have sensed the nearness of the wild, in nature and in people too. In recent years . . . I have set out to reach it. I have found it in the disappearing tail of a leopard I have been tracking for days, in the impossible promise of an African plain at first light, in the stripped carcass of a buffalo left to stink in the sun.—From The Glenthorne Cat
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