On a visit to Gabon, an American sociologist couple purchase an infant ape in order to study its development in an “enriched environment” — taking it back to California and raising it as a human being — and gain insight into human behaviour. The ape, named Silver, displays a remarkable aptitude for human skills, like using a toilet and brushing his teeth. Most shockingly, the ape can also speak — and after a long, eventful life among the humans, he has plenty to say.

Scathing and poignant, Silver is a no-holds-barred critique of modern life, told from the tragic perspective of a civilized animal stranded in the wilderness of Western society.

Pablo Urbanyi is a prolific and acclaimed Argentinean-Canadian writer. He immigrated to Canada in 1977 due to political chaos in Argentina. He taught Spanish at the University of Ottawa while pursuing his career as a writer. Although he writes exclusively in Spanish, his books have been translated to English, French, and Hungarian. In 2004, Urbanyi received the Latin American Achievement Award for literary expression. Silver was a finalist for the Argentinean Premio Planeta literary award in 1993.

Pablo Urbanyi's profile page

Hugh Hazelton is a Montreal writer and translator who specializes in the comparison of Canadian and Quebec literatures with those of Latin America. He has written four books of poetry and translates from Spanish, French and Portuguese into English; his translation of Vétiver, a book of poems by Joël Des Rosiers, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for French-English translation in 2006. He is a professor emeritus of Spanish at Concordia University in Montreal and former co-director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. In 2016 he won the Linda Gaboriau Award for his work on behalf of literary translation in Canada.

Hugh Hazelton's profile page

“Silver reminds us, in the most amusing way possible, of the complexity which is the human animal, for whom natural is ‘unnatural’.”

Canadian Literature