TIGER

A tiger does not arrive in a story as an idea. It arrives as weight, distance, breath and appetite. It arrives with a life that began before the human being who notices it, and will continue—if the world permits—after that human being has gone. To write about such an animal is therefore to begin with a responsibility: not to make it a metaphor too quickly.

TIGER grew from a question that has stayed with me for many years. What changes in us when we stop asking what another living being can mean for us, and begin asking what it might be like to be that being? The question is simple. Living by it is not. It asks us to admit that care does not always mean closeness, and that love does not grant us ownership.

This is the third book in the Marked Series. Arun carries his family's inheritance into an encounter with a tigress whose needs are very different from his own.

The novel is fiction. Its animals do not speak in human sentences, and it does not pretend that any person can completely know an animal’s inner world. The conversations at the centre of the book are an imaginative way of approaching a more humble truth: every creature has a point of view, and every creature can be harmed when humans insist on seeing only what we want to see.

There is grief in this book, but I did not want grief to be the final word. I wanted to write toward the possibility that tenderness can remain practical: that we can love what we cannot save perfectly, and still make room for another life to continue.

Stuart Corlett