GILLIGAN'S LAST ELEPHANT. By Gerald Hanley.

1962 1st edition. 8vo (134 x 202mm). Pp256. Blue boards, spine titled in gilt.

A novel telling of the fight between man and elephant, by a writer with experience of working as a young man on a farm in Kenya, and then, when in the army, patrolling in the isolated Northern Frontier District and what was then Abyssinia and Italian East Africa. "The great bull elephant he had run away from many years before, leaving his best friend to be destroyed by it, had become an obsession like a malignant growth in his memory... always beckoning them is the phantom of the old bull, no longer a mere mortal beast to be killed but the monstrous symbol of the ulimate challenge to their manhood." "His masculinity reminds one of Hemingway, but emotionally he is more mature. A first-rate novel by a writer richly endowed by nature and armed with a formidable technique", John Davenport, The Observer.