publisher’s summary from audible.com

A great read about the life and times of Jacob Jankowski, a “ninety or ninety-three year-old” man who lives in a nursing home.

Jacob is waiting for his family to take him to the circus. Jacob and Marlena married and had 5 children spending the first seven years at the Ringling Bros. circus before getting a job as a vet for a Chicago zoo. Marlena died a few years before Jacob was put into a nursing home. After finding out no one is coming for him, Jacob gets to the circus on his own.

After meeting Charlie, the circus manager Jacob begs to be allowed to accompany the circus selling tickets. Jacob has come home, and so ends the story;

The NY Times review gives you a wonderful insight into the story that is ‘Water for Elephants’.

from Publishers Weekly

Hosseini’s stunning debut novel starts as an eloquent Afghan version of the American immigrant experience in the late 20th century, but betrayal and redemption come to the forefront when the narrator, a writer, returns to his ravaged homeland to rescue the son of his childhood friend after the boy’s parents are shot during the Taliban takeover in the mid ’90s. Amir, the son of a well-to-do Kabul merchant, is the first-person narrator, who marries, moves to California and becomes a successful novelist.

But he remains haunted by a childhood incident in which he betrayed the trust of his best friend, a Hazara boy named Hassan, who receives a brutal beating from some local bullies. After establishing himself in America, Amir learns that the Taliban have murdered Hassan and his wife, raising questions about the fate of his son, Sohrab. Spurred on by childhood guilt, Amir makes the difficult journey to Kabul, only to learn the boy has been enslaved by a former childhood bully who has become a prominent Taliban official. The price Amir must pay to recover the boy is just one of several brilliant, startling plot twists that make this book memorable both as a political chronicle and a deeply personal tale about how childhood choices affect our adult lives. The character studies alone would make this a noteworthy debut, from the portrait of the sensitive, insecure Amir to the multilayered development of his father, Baba, whose sacrifices and scandalous behavior are fully revealed only when Amir returns to Afghanistan and learns the true nature of his relationship to Hassan.

Add an incisive, perceptive examination of recent Afghan history and its ramifications in both America and the Middle East, and the result is a complete work of literature that succeeds in exploring the culture of a previously obscure nation that has become a pivot point in the global politics of the new millennium.