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A Novel
An ebullient, funny, and hugely original novel told from the perspective of Beep, a squirrel monkey who—with the help of a brilliant young girl—forges the way forward for a planet in crisis.
In this immensely enjoyable and wise novel, it takes a sweet and personable squirrel monkey, Beep, to help us see the world we live in more clearly. While intending only to go deeper and higher into the Costa Rican rain forest to find a mate, he instead meets Inga, a kindly American tween on vacation with her family. Inadvertently, Beep travels to Manhattan with Inga. With her devoted help—and a bit of inspiration from a visiting Greta Thunberg, along with a dramatic zoo liberation—Beep manages to change the destiny of the world. He even finds his monkey love. Along the way, a vast cast of engaging and perceptive animals have a great deal to say about humanity and the divisions among us, our alien cities, our strange practices, our folly, as well as our beauty, and our promise, unfulfilled.
For fans of Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures and Dave Eggers's The Eyes and the Impossible, Beep is full of humor, inspiration, and remarkable new ways of understanding how we live. Urgent but never earnest in the face of the increasing threats to our planet, Beep the monkey inspires us all to stop being the problem and start being the solution, loving and laughing all the way.
"With a lexicon worthy of Anthony Burgess, our small but mighty hero is quick to recognize the perils facing our fragile world. But Beep is a love story most of all, told with the poetry of a pure heart." ―Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Dog of the North
"Beep is a wonder, both monkey and novel, our hero's curious, questing soul, the ebullient brilliance of Roorbach's prose. Wildly beautiful, funny, moving, entrancing, and hopeful, this is a story for our times, a ray of warm and generous light, a stern warning, a triumph of storytelling." ―Kate Christensen, author of Welcome Home, Stranger
"Beep is a work of glorious strangeness, invention, and hope. In this, Bill Roorbach's most original book yet, his simian hero makes monkeys of us all." ―Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She's Not There and co-author of Mad Honey
This information about Beep was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Bill Roorbach is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including the Flannery O'Connor Prize and O. Henry Prize winner Big Bend; Into Woods; Temple Stream; and the bestselling Life Among Giants. The 10th anniversary edition of his craft book, Writing Life Stories, is used in writing programs around the world. His work has been published in Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, the New York Times Magazine, Granta, New York, and dozens of other magazines and journals.
Life Among Giants was an Editor's Pick for Amazon's Best 2012, a Shelf Awareness Top Ten Best Fiction for 2012, and a winner of the Maine Literary Award for Fiction.
Author Interview
Link to Bill Roorbach's Website
Name Pronunciation
Bill Roorbach: ROAR-bahk
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