Giraffe

In 1975 secret police dressed in chemical warfare suits sealed off a zoo in a small Czechoslovakian town and orchestrated the slaying of forty-nine giraffes, the largest captive herd in the world. This massacre—never fully explained until now—lies at the heart of J. M. Ledgard's haunting first novel, which recounts the story of the giraffes from their capture in Africa to their deaths in a faraway country. At once vivid and unearthly, Giraffe tells of creatures that are alien and silent, of captivity, and of the inhabitants of a totalitarian state, sleepwalking through the "Communist moment" in the mid-1970s. Brilliantly transporting and dreamlike, Giraffe is a modern fable about the power of living creatures to enchant us into wakefulness.