Jamrach's Menagerie

Jamrach's Menagerie is a novel by the English writer Carol Birch, published in 2011. It mixes real historical figures with invented ones and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

The book opens with an encounter that decides the rest of Jaffy Brown's life. As a boy in the East End of London he is taken up in the jaws of an escaped tiger, and Charles Jamrach, the naturalist and dealer whose name is on the business, rescues him and offers him work in the shop and the yard.

Jaffy comes to love the menagerie, and he becomes close to another boy who works there, Tim Linver, and to Tim's sister. When the two of them are sixteen, Jamrach sends them aboard a whaling ship bound for the Dutch East Indies under his field agent Dan Rymer, with instructions to bring back a creature for the collection. Most of the novel is the voyage out, the crew, and the long stretch of ocean between the errand and the return, told in Jaffy's voice from a distance of many years.