The Rome Zoo

By: Pascal Janovjak

Narrated by: Robert Meldrum

Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

Rome, too, wants the sound of roaring as evening falls....

The Rome Zoo - a place borne of fantasy and driven by a nation’s aspirations. It has witnessed - and reflected in its tarnished mirror - the great follies of the 20th century. Now, in an ongoing battle that has seen it survive world wars and epidemics, the zoo must once again reinvent itself and assert its relevance in the Eternal City.

Caught up in these machinations is a cast of characters worthy of this baroque backdrop - a man desperate to find meaning in his own life, a woman tasked with halting the zoo’s decline and a rare animal, the last of its species, who bewitches the world.

Drifting between past and present, The Rome Zoo weaves together these and many other stories, forming a colourful and evocative tapestry of life at this strange place. It is both a love story and a poignant juxtaposition of the human need to classify, to subdue, with the untameable nature of our dramas and anxieties.

©2021 Pascal Janovjak (P)2021 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Critic reviews

"Pascal Janovjak evokes a memory of this fantastical place with a concisely efficient pen, but it is also an ingenious and dark-humoured re-writing of the present." (Lucie Tardin, Viceversa litérature)

"Pascal Janovjak has written a literary, philosophical, historical and romantic work of utter originality." (Marie-Lucile Kubacki, La Vie)