Penguin.ca

A novel about the simple truths that transcend species, the meaning of family, the lure of belonging, and the capacity for survival

Walt and Judy are deeply in love, but Judy longs for a child and finds that life is holding few surprises. Walt measures all beauty against Judy but doesn’t want her eyes to get any sadder. They stay side by side and search for distractions, realizing they may never have a family. On a day when hope seems low, Walt finds an unexpected opportunity in the pages of Life magazine. They meet Looee, who was born in Sierra Leone, and they raise him at home in the hills of Vermont and regard him as their son.

Looee is a hurricane in clothes. The house is torn apart, Judy asks questions of
herself, and is judged by friends and strangers, but the three of them find their
rhythm and eventually settle in to their own version of love and life between
four walls.

And then one night their unique family life is changed forever.

At the Girdish Institute, a group of chimpanzees has been studied for decades. There is proof that chimps have memories and solve problems, that they can learn language and need friends. They are political, altruistic, get angry, and forgive. Mr. Ghoul has been there from the beginning, and has grown up in a world of rivals, sex, and unpredictable loss.

Looee and Mr. Ghoul travel distant but parallel paths through childhood, adolescence, and early middle age until Looee, who endures the darker side of Girdish, ends up meeting his kindred spirit long after he moves from Vermont.

This is an edgy, epic, and heartfelt story about parenthood, friendship, loneliness, and conflict, about the things we hold sacred as humans and the facts that link us inevitably to a nature we often ignore.

Told simultaneously from the perspective of humans and chimpanzees, and in a way that only a literary master such as Colin McAdam can, A Beautiful Truth is a novel of great heart and wisdom that exposes the yearnings, cruelty, and resilience of all great apes.