The Manikin

The Manikin is not a mannequin, but the curious estate of Henry Craxton, Sr. in a rural western New York State. Dubbed the "Henry Ford of Natural History," by 1917 Craxton has become America's preeminent taxidermist. Into this magic box of a world--filled with eerily inanimate gibbons and bats, owls and peacocks, quetzals and crocodiles--wanders young Peg Griswood, daughter of Craxton's newest housekeeper. Part coming-of-age story, part gothic mystery, and part exploration of the intimate embrace between art and life, "The Manikin" is compulsively readable and beautifully written.

First sentence: The winter of 1846, when half of everything alive succumbed to the cold, has been stored for over eighty years in the mysterious mind common to the species, and though the owl didn't experience that winter, she remembers it-the poisonous smell of the air, the frost that pinned feathers to skin, the famine.

Year

1996

Language

English

Publisher

Picador

Editions

4

Pages

288

ISBN

9780312421380

Data source: Wikidata