Michael Ondaatje

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A breath-taking novel about love and the horrors of civil war from the bestselling author of The English Patient.

Anil''s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of a bloody civil war. Enter Anil Tissera, a young woman and forensic anthropologist born in Sri Lanka but educated in the West, sent by an international human rights group to identify the victims of the murder campaigns sweeping the island.

When Anil discovers that the bones found in an ancient burial site are in fact those of a much more recent victim, her search for the terrible truth hidden in her homeland begins. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity - a story driven by a riveting mystery.

''There is much to astonish, to disturb and to admire in this book... A rare triumph'' Guardian

©2011 Michael Ondaatje (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Warlight by Michael Ondaatje, read by George Blagden.'Our book of the year - and maybe of Ondaatje's career' Daily Telegraph Books of the YearLONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018 An elegiac, dreamlike novel set in post-WW2 London about memory, family secrets and lies, from the internationally acclaimed author of The English Patient'The past never remains in the past...'London, 1945. The capital is still reeling from the war. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel are abandoned by their parents who leave the country on business, and are left in the dubious care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. Nathaniel is introduced to The Moth's band of criminal misfits and is caught up in a series of teenage misadventures, from smuggling greyhounds for illegal dog racing to lovers' trysts in abandoned buildings at night.But is this eccentric crew really what and who they claim to be? And most importantly, what happened to Nathaniel's mother? Was her purported reason for leaving true? What secrets did she hide in her past? Years later Nathaniel, now an adult, begins to slowly piece together using the files of intelligence agencies - and through reality, recollection and imagination - the startling truths of puzzles formed decades earlier. -------'A novel of shadowy brilliance' The Times 'Fiction as rich, as beautiful, as melancholy as life itself, written in the visionary language of memory' Observer'Ondaatje brilliantly threads the mysteries and disguises and tangled loyalties and personal yearnings of the secret world...and has constructed something of real emotional and psychological heft, delicate melancholy and yet, frequently, page-turning plottiness. I haven't read a better novel this year.' Telegraph

Mavis Gallant is a contemporary legend, a frequent contributor to the New Yorker for close to fifty years, and the undisputed master of the short story. Her peerless prose captures the range of human experience while evoking time and place with unequaled skill. This superb collection of fifteen of Gallant's stories, edited and with an introduction by bestselling author Michael Ondaatje, gathers the best of her many stories set all over Europe, all written in Paris where she has long lived.Mysterious, funny, insightful, and heartbreaking, these are tales of expatriates and exiles, wise children and straying saints. Together they compose a secret history, at once intimate and panoramic, of modern times.Besides an introduction by Michael Ondaatje, this book includes the following stories:"The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street""Irina""The Latehomecomer""In Transit""The Moslem Wife""From the Fifteenth District""Speck's Idea""Baum, Gabriel, 1935-( )""The Remission""Grippes and Poches""Forain""August""Mlle. Dias de Corta""In Plain Sight""Scarves, Beads, Sandals"Afterword: About the Stories, by Mavis Gallant

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With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje returns to poetry, where he began his career over fifty years ago, and what a return it is.

Born in Sri Lanka during the Second World War, Ondaatje was sent as a child to school in London, and later moved to Canada. While he has lived here since, these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world ? describing himself as a ?mongrel,? someone born out of diverse cultures.

Here, rediscovering the influence of every border crossed, he moves back and forth in time, from a childhood in Sri Lanka to Moliere?s chair during his last stage performance, from icons in Bulgarian churches to the California coast and loved Canadian rivers, merging memory with the present, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss. At first sight it is a glittering collection of fragments and memories ? but small, intricate pieces of a life are precisely what matter most to Ondaatje. They make an emotional history. As he writes in the opening poem: ?Reading the lines he loves / he slips them into a pocket, / wishes to die with his clothes / full of torn freestanzas / and the telephone numbers / of his children in far cities?. Poetry ? where language is made to work hardest and burns with a gem-like flame - is what Ondaatje has returned to in this intimate history.

''My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje''
JHUMPA LAHIRI, author of The Namesake

©2024 Michael Ondaatje (P)2024 Penguin Audio