The Secret Life of the Panda

'The Secret Life of the Panda' is a collection of stories as subtle as they are exotic, suffused with a delicate realism that effaces the line marking where strangeness begins. The stories encompass diverse settings and situations: revolutionaries in Cuba, a heretical naturalist in 16th Century Germany, the private worlds of those growing up and growing old in contemporary Britain. But in all of them Jackson captures with precise external imagery and inward observation, moments of penetrating personal significance for the characters. This subtle but exotic collection forms a menagerie of the imagination, in which the reader encounters a variety of creatures from water fleas to oropendola birds, appearing as specimens to be anatomically examined or as totems enabling the characters to live those parts of themselves otherwise hidden.