{
    "id": 503546,
    "slug": "elephant-complex-john-gimlette",
    "nstc": null,
    "title": "Elephant Complex",
    "subtitle": null,
    "collection_title": null,
    "collection_part_number": null,
    "annotation": null,
    "description": "No one sees the world quite like John Gimlette. As The New York Times once noted, he writes with enormous wit, indignation, and a heightened sense of the absurd. Writing for both the adventurer and the armchair traveler, he has an eye for unusually telling detail, a sense of wonder, and compelling curiosity for the inside story. This time, he travels to Sri Lanka, a country only now emerging from twenty-six years of civil war. Delving deep into the nation's story, Gimlette provides us with an astonishing, multifaceted portrait of the island today.\n\nBut this is also a story of friendship and remarkable encounters. In the course of his journey, Gimlette meets farmers, war heroes, ancient tribesmen, world-class cricketers, terrorists, a former president, old planters, survivors of great massacres and perhaps some of their perpetrators. That's to say nothing of the island's beguiling fauna: elephants, crocodiles, snakes, storks, and the greatest concentration of leopards on Earth.\n\nHere is a land of extravagant beauty and profound devastation, of ingenuity and catastrophe, possessed of both a volatile past and an uncertain future, a place capable of being at once heavenly and hellish, all brought to vibrant, fascinating life here on the page. ",
    "imprint": null,
    "language_code": "eng",
    "original_language_code": null,
    "page_count": 528,
    "duration_seconds": null,
    "publication_date_first": "2016-01-01",
    "publication_date_latest": "2016-01-01",
    "cover_url": null,
    "editions": [],
    "ratings_count": 0,
    "read_count": 0,
    "review_count": 0,
    "favorite_count": 0,
    "reading_status_read_count": 0,
    "reading_status_reading_count": 0,
    "reading_status_want_to_read_count": 0,
    "rating_average": null,
    "ratings_distribution": {
        "1": 0,
        "2": 0,
        "3": 0,
        "4": 0,
        "5": 0
    },
    "created_at": "2025-09-19T14:36:54+00:00",
    "updated_at": "2025-10-29T00:42:27+00:00",
    "publisher": {
        "id": 4215,
        "slug": "quercus",
        "name": "Quercus",
        "created_at": "2025-09-19T13:08:55+00:00",
        "updated_at": "2025-09-19T15:10:07+00:00"
    },
    "contributors": [],
    "genres": [],
    "subjects": []
}