Book excerpt: Winner of the Prix Medicis, the Prix du Jury Jean Giono and the Prix du roman Fnac. Shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize and the European Book Award. Where Tigers are at Home is a large-scale (approx 265,000 words in translation) multi-strand novel set in Brazil. The strands are interwoven through the central figure Eleazard von Wogau, a French foreign correspondent living in Alcantara, a town in the north-east of Brazil; they also vary widely in style and content.Each of these strands has its own interest, though they do gradually merge towards the end in the action around the governor, his wife and Nelson s revenge. The other unifying factor in the book is the figure of the early 17th century scholar, Athanasius Kircher. As a student, von Wogau had a special interest in Kircher; now he has been sent a biography to edit and each of the 32 chapters of Where Tigers are at Home starts with a section from it."