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
The Garden of Evening Mists once lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan." Yet Kassabova "found [the novel] impossible to love" because of "the quality of the writing." She found "no discernible personality in the dutiful, dull voice of Yun Ling", and the novel's overall effect "one of surprising blandness". On 25 July 2012, the book was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and on 11 September it was shortlisted. On 14 March 2013, it won the Man Asian Literary Prize. On 14 June 2013, it won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It was one of eight