Life of Pi is a fantasy adventure novel written by Yann Martel. In the story, the protagonist Piscine 'Pi' Molitor Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry, explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck, while stranded on a boat in the Pacific Ocean. Martel brought the idea of rituals many times throughout the novel as well as storytelling. Rituals give structure to abstract ideas and emotions�in other words, ritual is an alternate form of storytelling. It was rituals and storytelling that kept Pi Patel sane.





The novel was first published by Knopf Canada in September 2001, and the UK edition won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction the following year.[1] It was chosen for CBC Radio's Canada Reads 2003, where it was championed by author Nancy Lee. It won the 2003 Boeke Prize, a South African novel award. Its French translation, L'Histoire de Pi, was also chosen in the French version of the reading competition, Le combat des livres.