The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival » (Unabridged)

JOHN VAILLANT's first book was the national bestseller The Golden Spruce, which won the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction, as well as several other awards. He has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Outside, National Geographic and The Walrus, among other publications. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife and children.

From the Hardcover edition.

The hunt for a man-eating tiger across the forbidding landscape of Russia's Far East.

When Yuri Trush was called in to investigate an attack by a Siberian tiger, what he found was unlike anything he'd ever encountered. Nothing remained of the victim but stumps of bone protruding from his boots. Even more chilling was the evidence that this attack had been carefully orchestrated, as if the tiger was seeking revenge. Before long, the beast struck again, and Trush, leader of a tiger conservation unit, found himself forced to hunt this animal through the brutal cold of a Siberian winter, becoming intimately acquainted with the tiger's history, motives, and unique method of attack--until their harrowing final encounter.

John Vaillant recreates these astonishing events against the backdrop of Russia's most remote frontier, a place where the native peoples worship tigers but poachers threaten the species' survival. He describes the historic collisions between Chinese and...

The New York Times - Edward Lewine

What makes The Tiger a grand addition to the animal-pursuit subgenre is the sensitive way in which Vaillant…evokes his cat. Few writers have taken such pains to understand their monsters, and few depict them in such arresting prose…When the tiger stalks, the book soars; when it hides, the book sags, but only a little. Vaillant is an obsessive researcher who marshals his battalion of facts in service to the story, which is a nice way of saying that some of this book can be rough going, but it's all interesting and it pays off.