Life of Pi

Yann Martel's Man Booker Prize winner follows Pi Patel — a boy who practices Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam simultaneously — through 227 days adrift on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger after a cargo ship sinks in the Pacific. It works as a gripping survival adventure and as a philosophical meditation on faith, storytelling, and the nature of reality, and the ambiguous ending is one of the most genuinely provocative in recent literary fiction. Faith families should go in with eyes open: Pi's religious syncretism is central, not peripheral, and violence involving animals is graphic at points. Sexual content is minimal; profanity is rare. For readers fourteen and up who are comfortable sitting with hard theological questions, it's a rare novel that earns every page of its acclaim.