The Tusk That Did the Damage

By: Tania James

When a young elephant is brutally orphaned by poachers and then captured, it is only a matter of time before he breaks his chains and begins terrorising the countryside, earning his malevolent name from the humans he kills and then tenderly buries with leaves.

Manu, the studious son of a rice farmer, loses his cousin to the Gravedigger and is drawn, with his wayward brother Jayan, into the alluring world of ivory hunting, while his family relationships grow ever more complicated.

Emma is working on a documentary set in a Kerala wildlife park with her best friend. Her work leads her to witness the porous boundary between conservation and corruption and she finds herself caught up in her own betrayal.

As the novel hurtles toward its tragic climax, these three storylines fuse into a wrenching meditation on love and revenge, fact and myth, duty and sacrifice. In a feat of audacious imagination and arrestingly beautiful prose, The Tusk That Did the Damage tells an original and heartbreaking story about how we treat nature, and each other.

Tania James’s debut novel, Atlas of Unknowns, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian literature. She has also written the short-story collection Aerogrammes and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Granta, Elle India, Boston Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, One Story, Orion and A Public Space. Three stories from Aerogrammes were finalists for Best American Short Stories 2008 and 2011. From 2011 to 2012, she was a Fulbright fellow to India living in New Delhi. She now lives in Washington DC.