'In my experience, a castaway's worst mistake is to hope too much and do too little.

Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate.

To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away.

There was much I had to do.'After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, one solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific.

The crew of the surviving vessel consists of a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan, a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger and Pi - a 16 year-old Indian boy.

Yann Martel's Life of Pi is a transformative novel, a dazzling work of imagination that will delight and astound readers in equal measure.

It is a timeless, thought-provoking novel that won the Man Booker Prize and became an international phenomenon.