The Secret Life of the Panda

The Secret Life of the Panda is a collection of unclassifiable stories suffused with a delicate realism so skilful it is impossible to trace the line that marks where strangeness begins. The stories encompass diverse settings and situations: revolutionaries in Cuba, a heretical naturalist in 16th Century Germany, the private worlds of those growing up and growing old in modern Britain. But in all of them Jackson captures with precise external imagery and inward observation moments of penetrating personal significance for the characters.

This subtle but exotic collection forms a menagerie of the imagination, in which the reader encounters, in an intimacy sometimes wild and sometimes captive, a variety of creatures from water fleas to oropendola birds, appearing as specimens to be anatomically examined or as totems enabling the characters to live those parts of themselves otherwise hidden.

Contents:

• Anton’s Discovery
• Lady with an Ermine
• The City in Flames
• The Secret Life of the Panda
• Paper Wraps Rock
• Boys’ Games
• Cut Short
• The Rabbit Keeper
• Flaubert’s Poison
• The Island
• Spadework
• The Rope
• Shell Fire
• Made of Glass