Tigers in red weather - Ruth Padel

After a terrible year, the end of a five-year affair and the death of her father, Ruth Padel wants out from normal life and happens across an advert for a trip to India. She visits a tiger reserve - and so begins a remarkable journey and an obsession. She travels across the world, Bhutan to Siberia, China to Sumatra, into jungles and into myths, in search of tigers: the most beautiful, and one of the most endangered, animals in the world. In every jungle, among the snakes, scorpions and animals living their secret lives, she meets "defenders of the wild", scientists, guards and conservationists struggling to protect forest animals from armed poachers, live electrocuting fences, poisoning. As she becomes more passionately interested in her elusive subject, she contemplates the meaning of
obsession: where it takes us, how it shapes us. Indeed, it is our obsession with tigers that has brought them to the edge of extinction. Tigers stalk the pages of this book more vividly than in any wildlife programme. Both a captivating piece of natural history and a beautiful piece of travel literature, Tigers in Red Weather is also an absorbing exploration of obsession, and of the human heart.

Ruth Padel is an award-winning poet, journalist and broadcaster. She lives in North London with her daughter.

There are few women writing non-fiction today with such a sophisticated understanding of language, such a nuanced approach to style, and such a brazen willingness to engage with the big issues, personal and political. This is a gripping and informative book, always intriguing and occasionally dazzling
GUARDIAN

Thrilling and surprising . . . her prose has an intense, lush quality . . . She has an adventurer's intrepid spirit and a poet's eye for detail and ear for dialogue
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

INDEPENDENT

Ruth Padel is a wonderful writer and she has produced perhaps the best book ever written on the places where tigers live
EVENING STANDARD