The New York Times - "The Plague"

If you’re going to read only one novel this year that has an opening chapter narrated by a newly born giraffe, why shouldn’t it be this one? Finding a convincing “voice” for such a creature is obviously going to test any novelist, and this giraffe, named Snehurka, appears to have attended a rather perfervid creative writing class: “The first thing I see is my own form, my hooves impossibly far away, slicked with fluid, and my mazed hide, bloodied, flickering in the haze, burning, as though I am not passing from my mother to the ground, but from the constellation Camelopardalis into the Earth’s atmosphere.”

If this is the kind of thing you like, you’re going to like this novel a lot. For my money it’s an opening that threatens to cripple the work completely, and if Ledgard gets away with it, it’s because we’re prepared to be indulgent toward what is by any standard an ambitious and remarkable first novel. This is not to say Ledgard needed to have been quite so indulgent of himself.

The Prague Post - "Giraffe explores science, secrets"

Jonathan Ledgard: I was a Central and Eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist at the time. One day, around 2001, I came across a snippet in one of the Czech papers. It was just a line in an interview with someone who later defected, to the effect that he had filmed the birth of a giraffe for Czechoslovak state television, but that the footage had disappeared after secret police had shot dead all the giraffes in that zoo. Could this be true? I was captivated. I spent a couple of years researching the book, then got sent to Afghanistan to look for Osama bin Laden, which is where I started to write it.

The Harvard Book Review - "Sticking their Necks out in Czechoslovakia"

The impossibility of the giraffes' survival in Czechoslovakia is evident to nearly all those involved in their capture and transport, yet each participant performs his part. Hus, the bureaucrat who oversees the transfer of the giraffes, is the only character who expresses enthusiasm about creating a "Camelopardais bohemica" to entertain the worker. This enthusiasm, however, is governed by self-interest rather than idealism. Hus is characterized as "a careerist" rather than an ideologue. Idealism has long since failed. The characters that populate Ledgard's novel are not delusional they are practical. They are fully aware that rebellion will lead only to the destruction of the little personal freedom they have retained. Jiri the sharpshooter who kills the giraffes says, "I am a Communist because I wish to remain in the forest" and later adds, "I hold to CSSR out of fear and am openly relieved at its banality." These citizens know that to retain their ounce of freedom, to be left alone to the woods and to the summer cottages where "the only regime is mushroom picking, moonshine, and card games," they must simply not participate in the public sphere.

The Guardian - "Up to their necks"

Ledgard places his characters fully at the service of this essentially neoplatonist worldview. They exist mainly as mouthpieces for research and mood, and show little convincing interaction or development. That's fine by me: realism isn't the intention here. But a symbolist work - however beguiling the writing (and the prose here is certainly that) - must stand or fall on the depth of its concepts. And seductive though Ledgard's reworking of this ancient tradition undoubtedly is, it's still just posh mysticism, and the first step on a road that leads inevitably, alas, to Paulo Coelho. Where I should have felt moved I started to feel manipulated, which is a shame, because there's plenty to like in Ledgard's novel: not least the wondrous, and gentle, giraffes.