The Secret Life of the Panda

The stories in The Secret Life of the Panda encompass diverse settings and situations: revolutionaries in South America, a heretical naturalist in 16th Century Holland, the private worlds of those growing up and growing old in contemporary Britain. But in all of them Nick Jackson captures with precise external imagery and inward observation moments of penetrating personal significance for the characters. This subtle but exotic collection forms a menagerie of the imagination, in which the reader encounters a variety of creatures from water fleas to oropendola birds, appearing as specimens to be anatomically examined or as totems enabling the characters to live those parts of themselves otherwise hidden.