Life of Pi sort of with a capital 'S' – something that would direct my life." He spoke of being lonely and needing direction in his life, and found that writing the novel met this need. The name of Martel's tiger, Richard Parker, was inspired by a character in Edgar Allan Poe's nautical adventure novel "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" (1838). In this book, Richard Parker is a mutineer who is stranded and eventually cannibalized on the hull of an overturned ship (and there is a dog aboard who is named Tiger). The author also had in mind another occurrence
In the Name of the Father (novel) alleviated throughout by humor and poignancy."-Jerre Mangione of The Philadelphia Bulletin "A novel about coming of age in working-class Chicago during the 1950s and early 1960s, In the Name of the Father chronicles the childhood and adolescence of Tonto Schwartz, son of an Italian mother and a Jewish father who dies when Tonto is an infant, leaving as his only legacy his son's apparently jokey name. Tony Ardizzone's first novel (the author is 29) is dense with particular details of Tonto's world—the texture of his Catholic education, the character and qualities of his young cronies, the sociology of his tough