Jamrach’s Menagerie – Carol Birch

Condition : Good.
Canongate, 2011, Medium-format Paperback – Historical Fiction – 348 pp.

A great, salty, historical adventure, with an extraordinary story of love and sacrifice at its core, this book is an astonishing literary achievement.
Brilliantly written and utterly compulsive, Carol Birch’s novel evokes the smells, sights and flavours of the nineteenth century from the squalor of London to the islands of the South Seas.

Following an incident with an escaped tiger, nineteenth-century London street urchin Jaffy Brown goes to work for Mr. Charles Jamrach, the famed importer of exotic animals, alongside Tim, a good but sometimes spitefully competitive boy.