Art of Patience

Winner of the Prix Renaudot 2019A New York Times Best Book of 2021‘Extraordinarily beautiful… a long last loving glance at the planet.’ Carl Safina, author of Becoming WildThe Art of Patience sees the renowned French adventurer and writer set off for the high plateaux of remotest Tibet in search of the elusive snow leopard. There, in the company of leading wildlife photographer Vincent Munier and two companions, at 5,000 metres and in temperatures of -25ºC, the team set up their hides on exposed mountainsides, and occasionally in the luxury of an icy cave, to await a visitation from the almost mythical beast.This tightly focused and tautly written narrative is simultaneously a dazzling account of an exacting journey, an apprenticeship in the art of patience, an acceptance of the ruthlessness of the natural world and, finally, a plea for ecological sanity.A small masterpiece, it is one of those books that demands to be read again and again.

‘In The Art of Patience: Seeking the Snow Leopard in Tibet, the French writer Sylvain Tesson chronicles his rapturous journey through Tibet’s Chantang plateau with the wildlife photographer Vincent Munier. Tesson’s words, in a ravishing translation by Frank Wynne, paint pictures as vivid as any photograph.’, ‘Tesson is a transcendent travel writer… [The Art of Patience] inspires action, thought, silence – and perhaps also prayer.’, ‘A wonderful evocation of waiting and watching for nature.’, ‘Beautifully written, beautifully translated, intensely moving and totally absorbing.’, ‘The Art of Patience is extraordinarily beautiful, a narrative of prose that flows with poetry, a long last loving glance at the planet, a visit to the vital bedside of a living world determined to stay alive.’

Sylvain Tesson is one France’s leading travel and nature writers, whose books have won him hundreds and thousands of readers in France and a number of its top prizes, including the 2019 Prix Renaudot for The Art of Patience. His highly regarded Consolations of the Forest was published in English in 2014. Frank Wynne is an Irish literary translator whose translations, including works by Michel Houllebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder and Pierre Lemaitre, have won him a number of prizes. His translation of Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex 1 was shortlisted for the 2018 Booker International Prize.