Max and the Cats number of zoo animals caged in the hold—but after being rescued and making a life for himself in Brazil continues to find his German past impossible to escape. The novel came to widespread public attention in 2002 when Canadian writer Yann Martel won the Man Booker Prize for "Life of Pi". Martel's novel is about a boy, Pi, who finds himself trapped on a boat with a tiger after the ship he and his family are sailing on sinks. The family were zookeepers, and the animals they were transporting in the hold sink with the rest of the ship, except
Beatrice and Virgil was around $3 million, probably the highest ever advance for a single Canadian novel. Martel's earlier novel, "Life of Pi", won the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and sold seven million copies worldwide. Early on in the story, the protagonist, an author, (some say that the protagonist is a reflection of Yann himself) makes reference to Primo Levi's "If This Is a Man"; Art Spiegelman's "Maus"; David Grossman's "See Under: Love"; Martin Amis's "Time's Arrow"; George Orwell's "Animal Farm"; Albert Camus's "The Plague"; and Pablo Picasso's "Guernica". Extracts are quoted from Flaubert's "The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator" which