Yann Martel, "The High Mountains of Portugal"

Martel won the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Life of Pi, a novel that was at once an iconic seafaring adventure, a moving portrait of human-animal bonding, and an enactment of spiritual questions. In his fifth novel, the author of Beatrice and Virgil and The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios takes another magical plotline—the search for a lost treasure—and gives it a philosophical underpinning. Tomas, living in Lisbon in 1904, finds a journal that sets him on a quest. His actions come to bear decades later on a Portuguese doctor investigating Agatha Christie and, still later, on a Canadian senator who’s come to Portugal to mourn his wife’s death.

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