The Condor's Head

Nov 30, 2025 9:19 AM

Author:Ferdinand Mount

The Condor's Head

A fair-haired young man from Virginia sees a dark girl rowing on the lake at Versailles and he falls in love. She turns out to be the Duchess de La Rochefoucauld, known as Rosalie, married to a man twice her age who also happens to be her uncle. It is the spring of 1875 and the young American, William Short, nicknamed Wm, has crossed the Atlantic to serve as secretary to his adoptive father Thomas Jefferson at the Paris embassy. Lodging on the Champs Elysees with Jefferson's two young daughters and their teenage slave Sally Hemings, Wm becomes the darling of the free spirits of the ancien regime, who want to copy everything American, including revolution and the pursuit of happiness.

But this is a time when nothing runs straight, certainly not the pursuit of happiness. Together and apart, Wm and Rosalie endure the bloodiest days of the Terror when everyone loses their heads or their illusions except for one man, but that man is about to become President of the United States.

Stylish, intelligent and witty, The Condor's Head is by turns tense and erotic, incredibly funny and unbearably sad. It includes the real-life letters of Wm and Rosalie and Jefferson, some never published before. It also incidentally reveals the truth about the Third President and Sally Hemings.

Reviews

It is extremely funny. Old Saramago writes with a masterfully light hand, and the humour is tender, a mockery so tempered by patience and pity that the sting is gone though the wit remains vital... a series of contained miracles of absurdity, quiet laughter rising out of a profound, resigned, affectionate wisdom

—— Ursula K Le Guin , Guardian

José Saramango wrote his final book with great panache

—— Margaret Reynolds , The Times

Here is a book as serious as it is charming; amid its ironies runs a sustained pleas for the subversive workings of the imagination: "every elephant contains two elephants, one who learns what he's being taught and another who insists on ignoring it all". Thank goodness for that'

—— Guardian

A novel of wit, warmth and wonder

—— Yann Martel

Here he has seized the opportunity to turn an unlikely tale of a transalpine hike into something far larger even than its elephantine subject.

—— Amanda Hopkinson , Independent

The novel has a charming fairy tale quality, with its kings and courtiers, it pachyderm protagonist and his mysterious mahout: this is amoung the most charming of Saramago's works

—— Michael Kerrigan , Times Literary Supplement

A playful, intellectual, very European novel, at times if feels reminiscent of Kafka in his lighter moments

—— Independent on Sunday

In laconic prose, Saramago skilfully builds a journey of delicious digressions that set up resonances from Miguel de Cervantes' picaresque chivalries to Czech humorist Jaroslav Hasek's pigeon - fancying soldier Schweik - all delivered with a jocular pedantry that satirises pomp and grand designs'

—— Financial Times

It's an epic ramble that the Nobel Prize-winning author saw as a metaphor for life

—— Timeout

Saramago enjoys filling out the details with improvisatory skill and imagination

—— John Spurling , Sunday Times

The Elephant's Journey is well worth picking up

—— Syndicated review to local papers

A delicate meditation on mortality, decay and the fading of beauty

—— Martin Sixsmith , The Week

Historical fiction at its best

—— Orlando Figes , The Week

No novel is perfect, but this small, wonderfully atmospheric and immensely poignant story...comes very close

—— Sunday Times, *Summer Reads of 2021*

Blisteringly angry..,begins as a black comedy but gradually turns much darker with the mad-as-hell narrator suspected of murdering his lovers in London

—— Sunday Telegraph

Sutton shows us everything through Freeman's eyes and he pulls it off very well indeed. A horrible character but a compelling narrator

—— William Leith , Evening Standard

Sutton shows us everything through Freeman's eyes and he pulls it off very well indeed

—— William Leith , The Scotsman

This darkly comic novel with it's brilliantly acute observations of life in London in the 21st Century completely captures the zeitgeist and raises more than a few laughs.

—— Carla McKay , Daily Mail

Gripping and darkly comic tale of 21st-century material greed

—— Shortlist

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