Chris Flynn - Mammoth

Brilliant. Hilarious. Unique. These are just some of the words to describe Mammoth by Chris Flynn - one of the most original novels you'll read all year.  

Narrated by a 13,000-year-old extinct American mastodon, Mammoth is an extraordinary leap of imagination from one of Australia's most exciting emerging talents. Find out why Elizabeth Gilbert, Favel Parrett, Christos Tsiolkas & Thomas Keneally are singing its praises.

Chris is joined in-conversation by author Mark Dapin. This conversation will take place on Zoom.

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About the Book

Narrated by a 13,000-year-old extinct American mastodon, Mammoth is the (mostly) true story of how the skull of a Tyrannosaurus bataar, a pterodactyl, a prehistoric penguin, the severed hand of an Egyptian mummy and the narrator himself came to be on sale at a 2007 natural history auction in Manhattan.

Ranging from the Pleistocene Epoch to nineteenth-century America and beyond, including detours to Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany, Mammoth illuminates a period of history when ideas about science and religion underwent significant change. By tracing how and when the fossils were unearthed, Mammoth traverses time and place to reveal humanity’s role in the inexorable destruction of the natural world.

With our planet on the brink of calamitous climate change, Mammoth scrutinises humanity’s role in the destruction of the natural world while also offering a message of hope.

Praise

Mammoth is astonishing, a novel that is by turns playful, uncomfortably excoriating, very funny and always deeply humane. The voice in Mammoth doesn't sound like a voice I’ve ever heard before and for those of us who love books and reading this is the pleasure and the hope that we are always chasing. This novel delivers. It is both a requiem for lost worlds and lost time, and it is also a sheer joy." — Christos Tsiolkas

“Chris Flynn has written a brilliant, hilarious, and curiously moving novel, featuring one the best narrators in literary history and –  without a doubt – the single best narrator in natural history. Why has nobody ever written a novel from the point of view of a Woolly Mammoth’s skeleton before? Because nobody was ever smart enough to do it. I simply love this story.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Signature of All Things. 

“Mammoth is an extraordinary gambit of the story-telling imagination of Chris Flynn, and a new way of listening to all the narratives of what we have  supplanted. Mammoth is playful and serious, encapsulating the macro-history of all life in the tale of one species. I don’t think anyone else has quite done that.”  — Thomas Keneally. 

“Funny, warm and totally unique – I loved it.” — Favel Parrett, author of There was Still Love and Past the Shallows.

About the Author

Chris Flynn is the author of The Glass Kingdom and A Tiger in Eden, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Age, The Australian, Griffith Review, Meanjin, Australian Book Review, The Saturday Paper, Smith Journal, The Big Issue, Monster Children, McSweeney’s and many other publications. 

He has conducted interviews for The Paris Review and is a regular presenter at literary festivals across Australia. Chris lives on Phillip Island, next to a penguin sanctuary.