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Extracts

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

The Distance of a Shout: Selected Poems

Michael Ondaatje is the author of seven novels; a memoir, Running in the Family; a non-fiction book on film, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film; and several books of poetry, including The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting. The English Patient received the Booker Prize in 1992 and the Golden Man Booker in 2018, and was made into a film directed by Anthony Minghella. Anil’s Ghost was awarded the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize and the Prix Médicis. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto.

From independence movements in Sri Lanka to train stations in contemporary Ontario, an intimate and witty selection of Michael Ondaatje’s most widely loved poems taken across fifty years 
 
'My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje' JHUMPA LAHIRI 
 
Through poems that grow out of his profound understanding of the subtle complexities of life and relationships, of how we lose and find ourselves, Michael Ondaatje navigates his own past, beginning with memories of his childhood in Sri Lanka and his eccentric family, to his life in rural southern Ontario with its beloved rivers, celebrations of treasured friends, the close ties of children. 
 
Ondaatje is one of the great poets of love, and here we follow him through the exhilarations of youth into that ‘storm of music’, the passionate, sensuous swerves of longing and desire, until we reach the calm of that moment when ‘only a cloud’s reflection holding you up / You swim into late afternoon’. 
 
The Distance of a Shout offers us a glimpse into the interwoven life and art of one of our most cherished poets and novelists – a reminder itself of the power of great poetry to shine a light on living. 
 
'Each new book of Michael Ondaatje’s is a literary event, but that is particularly true for his books of poetry' TERRANCE HAYES

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

At once violent and sensuous, calloused and tender

Moving and tragic. . . . Ondaatje is a poet and even his prose moves with rhythmic circular precision

Ondaatje’s eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint

Wonderful.... Ondaatje’s language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets. This is literature, art.

Booker prize winning author Michael Ondaatje invites you on a brutal, beautiful journey into the American West. . . 
 
At twenty-one years old, Billy the Kid has killed a man for each year he’s been alive. 
 
Roaming the blasted planes of the Wild West, he moves between friends, foes and lovers, fighting to keep just one step ahead of the law. Yet in this twisted wasteland – a country of mad dogs, of sweat and gore and blinding heat – the sheriffs play dirty too.Melding prose, poetry, imagined interviews and ephemeral photography, Ondaatje weaves together a lyrical reinterpretation of Billy’s short, infamous existence, forming a portrait of a young man, and a young country, borne out of violence, threaded through with disaster, yet rich in wonder. 
 
‘Ondaatje’s language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets. This is literature, art.’ Annie Dillard 
 
'Ondaatje’s eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint' Larry McMurtry

Running in the Family

Brightly coloured, sweet and painful, bloody-minded and otherworldly, [this book] achieves the status of legend

Eloquent, oblique, witty, full of light and feeling....Ondaatje's knowledge of the fragility and luck of life is very clear. So, too, is the grace and originality of his prose

Ondaatje has produced a remarkable book....Shimmering through the haze of heat and memory is an impressionistic, sometimes surreal portrait of an exotic time and place now gone, a colonial paradise that had its own rhythms and imperatives

A beautiful, luscious book. Michael Ondaatje has depicted his extraordinary family, who delighted in masks and costumes and love affairs that 'rainbowed over marriages' in the kind of language that makes glory of their lives. He has gone on a poet's journey to Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and the reader who travels with him enters a truly magical world

With a prose style equal to the voluptuousness of [Ondaatje's] subject and a sense of humor never too far away, Running in the Family is sheer reading pleasure

'During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed... I think all of our lives have been terribly shaped by what went on before us.' 
 
Twenty-five years after leaving his native Sri Lanka for the cool winters of Ontario, a chaotic dream of tropical heat and barking dogs pushes Michael Ondaatje to travel back home and revisit a childhood and a family he never fully understood. Along with his siblings and children, Ondaatje gathers rumours, anecdotes, poems, records and memories to piece together this fragmented portrayal of his family's past, his father's destructive alcoholism and the colourful stories and secrets of ancestors both disgraced and adored throughout centuries of Sri Lankan society. 
 
In an exotic, evocative portrait of the heat, wildlife, sounds and silences of the Sri Lankan landscape, Ondaatje combines vivid recreations of a privileged, eccentric older generation with a deeply personal reconciliatory journey in which he explores his own ghosts, and how his family's extraordinary history continues to influence his life.

Coming Through Slaughter

The downtown world of bars, whores, streetlife bursting with music is evoked so vividly, so pungently you seem to breathe in the atmosphere... I haven't been so excited by a new writer for a long time

A beautifully detailed story, perhaps the finest jazz novel ever written

Not only the best jazz novel ever written, but one of the best novels of any kind published in English in the last ten years

Michael Ondaatje is a novelist with the heart of a poet

Discover Michael Ondaatje's debut novel, 'a beautifully detailed story, perhaps the finest jazz novel ever written' Sunday Times 
 
Based on the life of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the legendary jazz pioneers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Coming Through Slaughter is an extraordinary recreation of a remarkable musical life and a tragic conclusion. Through a collage of memoirs, interviews, imaginary conversations and monologues, Ondaatje builds a picture of a man who would work by day at a barber shop and by night unleash his talent to wild audiences who had never experienced such playing. But Buddy was also playing the field with two women, and inside his head was a ticking time-bomb which he was unable to stop.

Warlight

A mesmerising new novel from the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The English Patient.

Our book of the year – and maybe of Ondaatje's career.

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight is a rare and beautiful thing – a deeply retrospective novel about war secrets that feels neither overstated nor overly ethereal. In sumptuous prose, Ondaatje limns the psyche of a man still trying to make sense of his complicated relationships and the mysteries surrounding his absent parents. One of the most absorbing books I’ve read all year.

Times Literary Supplement **Books of the Year 2018**

Warlight sucked me in deeper than any novel I can remember… fiction as rich, as beautiful, as melancholy as life itself.

From the very first sentence you’re desperate to find out what happens next… All is slowly, tantalisingly revealed, in flashbacks, fragments, digressions and stories within stories, narrated in majestic Ondaatjean style.

In Warlight we have a writer who knows exactly what he’s doing – 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.

The latest novel from the author of The English Patient is just glorious... rendered with Dickensian verve. My hot tip for the Booker Prize.

Ondaatje’s first novel in seven years mesmerizes from start to finish.

I spend the months before the publication of a new Michael Ondaatje novel trying to keep my expectations in check, telling myself it's simply unfair to expect as much of any writer as I expect from Ondaatje. Then he pulls off a Warlight, and I'm embarrassed by my own lack of faith... [Warlight] is surprising, delightful, heartbreaking and written as only Ondaatje could write it.

Compulsively and grippingly readable. In fact I read it first at a gallop, enthralled by the image of a city and a world distorted and all but destroyed by war, and then again slowly, determined to savour the details and extract as much as I could from it. Much remained puzzling on this second reading, but two things are clear: Michael Ondaatje is a marvellous writer, and Warlight is a novel which will continue to play in the reader’s imagination.

Ondaatje [is] such a thrilling writer… I loved [Warlight].

[Warlight is] so cunningly assembled… leaner than The English Patient and its focus is tighter, a searchlight’s focus.

Absorbing... this is a welcome return from a literary master who knows how to take human experience and cast it elegantly onto the page.

[A] gripping read from a grandmaster.

The crepuscular, dreamlike, post-1945 London that Michael Ondaatje invents in his novel Warlight continues to haunt you long after the plot itself.

A dark adult fairy tale where nothing is as it seems… Ondaatje’s magical mystery tour makes for an exceptionally entertaining literary journey.

Place your bets - with this glorious new book... Ondaatje could be in line for another Booker.

Haunting… [Ondaatje] casts a magical spell, as he takes you into his half-lit world of war and love, death and loss, and the dark waterways of the past.

Warlight is a subtly thrilling story… because of the powerful atmosphere Ondaatje invokes of unease, disquiet and the unknown. It’s a masterful book.

Ondaatje’s spare and evocative prose perfectly captures the crumbled austerity of post-war London… this is easily his most satisfying and seductive novel in years.

[There is a] fragile, haunting, almost whispered quality [to] Ondaatje’s writing… So finely constructed are his sentences that you find yourself holding your breath lest you inadvertently disturb their symmetry.

Ondaatje’s prose is consistently illuminating… It does not stroke the chin of its own wisdom, but allows meaning and poignancy to accumulate through inference and feint. In simple terms, it is an alluring narrative of character and incident told by a powerful storyteller.

Skilfully navigating espionage, betrayal and deception, Warlight... takes [Ondaatje] deep into John le Carré territory… a lyrical but sinister mosaic of a hidden world.

Warlight is Ondaatje’s most haunting novel after The English Patient… mesmerising.

A beautifully crafted work of fiction… [with a] stunning denouement.

This elegiac novel combines the stealth of an espionage thriller with the irresolute shifts of a memory play, purposefully full of fragments, loss and unfinished stories. Wonderful.

Lyrical but oblique, [Ondaatje’s] prose matches a mood of mystery and suspicion that tantalises.

The English Patient author Michael Ondaatje weaves another tale of love, loss and memory against a backdrop of World War II... The mysteries come together through a complex, non-linear narrative that revisits and revises each development with careful scrutiny.

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight stood out this year for its skill in making even the most familiar fictional terrain seem strange and unsettling… every time we think we’ve pinned down what Ondaatje is doing in this novel, he somehow manages to wriggle free. It’s a quite brilliant act of fictional escapology.

It's suspenseful, intense, and Ondaatje's prose is beautiful.

Ondaatje brings to life this work…with meticulous detail

Ondaatje is a skillfully deliberate writer

Warlight not only shines a light into the shadowy wars…but also the uncertain age of adolescene

This seam of subterfuge and the truth being gradually released from the shadows make Warlight gripping reading… Ondaatje adorns the walls with his characters like a master gallerist

Warlight is a layered, precisely written, erudite meditation on the damage we do when we make war. It’s eerily prescient.

An exquisite, elegiac account of a life forged in the shadow of other people's secrets, told in language as feathery and delicate as a moth.

I look above all else in fiction for sureness of touch with sentences – and that was abundantly in evidence…in Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight… [Warlight has] the unmistakable stamp of [the author] knowing exactly what [he’s] doing.

Ostensibly realistic, it is phantasmagoric… Everything he says bristles with improbable life. Reading it is like watching a movie in which, however much activity there is, the atmosphere dominates the plot

A meditative and dreamily lyrical espionage thriller

Ondaatje brings Warlight’s seemingly disparate fragments together with such skill that the ending feels not just satisfying but inevitable. The most lovely conjuring trick, it leaves you in awe of the magician. I emerged blinking into the glare of the 21st century, bereft in a way a novel hasn’t left me bereft for a longtime

Ondaatje’s onion of a novel, his first since 2011’s The Cat’s Table, combines rich intrigue with a meditation on how we rewrite our memories by examining them… a stunning return.

Nothing in the world of this novel is ever redundant; nothing is accidental. Whenever you come across a striking detail…you can be sure it will crop up again, be charged with more significance, be joined with the rest of the story in a long chain of meaning.

Ondaatje’s first novel in seven years is also one of his best – a quiet but profoundly powerful book… A superior, espionage novel about the unstable, shape-shifting nature of personal history.

The evocation of night journeys through the fog-bound city and along mysterious canals and forgotten rivers is spellbinding.

The Catholic Herald, **Books of the Year**

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight is one of the best books I’ve read in years. I’d pick it up again in a heartbeat.

Ondaatje’s prose is beautiful, and he successfully builds suspense and tension without seeming too heavy-handed

Michael Ondaatje is at his best when writing about awkward, quiet types

Ondaatje’s prose is consistently illuminating. Warlight is a meditation on the purpose and possibilities of storytelling

[T]his elegiac novel combines the stealth of an espionage thriller with the irresolute shift of a memory play, purposefully full of fragments, loss and unfinished stories. Wonderful

Warlight is a subtly thrilling story… It's a masterful book

-          So finely are his sentences constructed that you find yourself holding your breath lest you inadvertently disturb their symmetry

[C]ompulsively and grippingly readable… Ondaatje is a marvelous writer, and Warlight is a novel which will continue to play in the reader’s imagination

For the lyrical strength of the prose alone, a new Michael Ondaatje novel is always a treat

Warlight is a layered, precisely written, erudite meditation on the damage we do when we make war

**LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018** 
 
An elegiac novel set in post-WW2 London about memory, family secrets and lies, from the internationally acclaimed author of The English Patient 
 
 It is 1945, and London is still reeling from the Blitz. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are apparently abandoned by their parents, left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women all who seem determined to protect Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? A dozen years later, Nathaniel journeys through recollection, reality and imagination to uncover all he didn’t know or understand in that time, to piece together a story that feels something like the truth. 
 
 ‘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... I haven’t read a better novel this year’ Telegraph

The Cat's Table

From the acclaimed author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion: a stunningly beautiful and moving new novel about a boy's life-changing journey from Ceylon to England in the 1950s.

One of the most admirable and enthralling literary novels of the year

Superbly poised between the magic of innocence and the melancholy of experience

Michael Ondaatje's impressive new novel, containing dreams and fantasy between a ship's flanks...is, in the most etymological way, a wonderful novel: one full of wonders

Atmospheric, elegiac and at times, like Ondaatje's most famous novel, The English Patient, unbearably poignant

I love this book: the boys running wild on the long sea voyage, the slow revelation of the adult world they don't fully understand, the loss of the past and the beginning of the future, and even a sort of thriller in there! And the beauty of the sentences. Perfection

Part memoir, complete masterpiece... Written with tenderness, wisdom and sharp emotional recall, this is an exuberant elegy to innocence

Grave and playful at the same time, beautifully written and moving

It's impossible to explain through any discussion of plot and character the hypnotic brilliance of The Cat's Table. The joy of boyhood and the darkness at its edges are conveyed in sense of extraordinary imagination... It is entirely...well, Ondaatje-esque

Vividly follows the passage from Ceylon to England of an 10 year-old boy on a line full of eccentric, mysterious passengers

Ondaatje's prose, flawless as ever, deals with loneliness, friendship and pre-pubescent love

From the acclaimed author of The English Patient comes a stunningly beautiful novel about a boy's life-changing journey from Ceylon to England in the 1950s. 
 
What had there been before such a ship in my life? A dugout canoe on a river journey? A launch in Trincomalee harbour? There were always fishing boats on our horizon. But I could never imagine the grandeur of this castle that was to cross the sea. 
 
 
In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a huge liner in Colombo bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the lowly 'cat's table' , as far from the Captain's table as can be, with a ragtag group of adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship crosses the Indian Ocean the boys tumble from one adventure to another, and at night they spy on a shackled prisoner, his crime and fate a mystery that will haunt them forever...

The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje lyrically portrays the convergence of four damaged lives in a bomb-riddled Italian villa in the last days of World War II.

Hana, a Canadian nurse, exhausted by death, and grieving for her own dead father; the maimed thief-turned-Allied-agent, Caravaggio; Kip, the emotionally detached Indian sapper - each is haunted in different ways by the man they know only as the English patient, a nameless burn victim who lies in an upstairs room. His extraordinary knowledge and morphine-induced memories - of the North African desert, of explorers and tribes, of history and cartography; and also of forbidden love, suffering and betrayal - illuminate the story, and leave all the characters for ever changed.

Anil's Ghost

From the author of The English Patient and Running in the Family, a breathtaking novel about love and the horrors of civil war.

There is much to astonish, to disturb and to admire in this dense book... a rare triumph

This is why I read, this is why literature matters, this, in short, is IT!... By the closing pages Anil's Ghost has come as close to a holy book as a novel ever should

A deeply felt and highly accomplished survey of devastated paradise... which both plunges you into the carnage of Sri Lanka's civil war and keeps you aware of the island's past splendours of civilisation. Barbarity and art hauntingly mingle in this fine book

It is Ondaatje's extraordinary achievement to use magic in order to make the blood of his own country real... Nowhere has he written more beautifully

A truly wondrous book... I was as enthralled as I have not been since The English Patient

Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden

This work of 'fiction' will endure as a hitory of these times showing us how we may face even the most extreme actions of our civilisation through wise, compassionate re-creation

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 educted 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 riventing mystery.

Handwriting

'A set of intimate, gentle poems, transcribing the history, landscapes and traditions of Ceylon [Sri Lanka]' - The Times

The way his novels are truly poetic, Ondaatje's thrilling poems often read like exquisite, unwritten Ondaatje novels.

Handwriting explores Sri Lankan history, geography, ceremonies and myths. It is crowded with scintillating images, such as a tightrope-walker caught in a power cut, beautiful colours and textures

Michael Ondaatje defies the normal distinction between poet and novelist. His writing is consistently tuned to a visionary pitch

Ondaatje's poems are a joy, as all his writing is. The wonderful twists, painful and funny; the utterly individual touch and sumptuous wealth of language; they're all familiar, but as one would expect, they seem to keep getting better, more assured and sometimes more crazy

His poems read with the same whimsical precision and authority one finds in Ondaatje's prose. He is the most sensibly ironic writer I've read in years, and the most generously disposed. Would that all worlds were this deftly attended

A breathtaking collection... If you're going to buy one book this year, buy this one. Ten years from now you'll still be reading it with pleasure

The final poem, "Last Ink," explains why the need to preserve human experience through art is as instinctive as the desire to die in a lover's arms. Dealing with large-scale emotions and scenes of love and war, these are poems that strike to the heart

The poems in Handwriting are memories of Sri Lanka: the rituals and traditions, history and geography, the smells and tastes and colours of his first home. Here are sunless forests, cattle-bells, stilt-walkers 'with the movement of prehistoric birds'; a Buddha buried 'so roots/like fingers of a blind monk/spread for two hundred years over his face'; 'saffron and panic seed, lotus flowers, sandalwood; a lover, who lay her fearless heart/light as a barn owl/against him all night'. 
 
Handwriting is an elegy for lost childhood, for a culture and language lost to the turmoil of history, but it is also a glimpse of the source of the writer's delicate, erotic, mysterious imagination. By focussing on writing frankly about beautiful things, Ondaatje takes the poems beyond narrative to these simple, deeply sensual images - given to us in a language that is pared, cursive and exquisite.

Michael Ondaatje

After a break of nearly 20 years, Ondaatje has returned to poetry, ruminating on sliding doors moments in life… This is a generous, moving book

Extraordinarily attuned to hauntings… Ondaatje is a connoisseur – and creator – of atmospheres… Wonderful

Each new book of Michael Ondaatje’s is a literary event, but that is particularly true for his books of poetry. In A Year of Last Things he comes close to writing something like a timeless poem, “a memory poem” that reflects outside and inside time at the same moment, recording the mercurial, mysterious feeling of being alive. The poems become intimate, unresolved stories, loyal to feeling and presence, the lyricism of dreams applied to narratives of lives and landscapes. A Year of Last Things is a remarkable, incomparable new collection

Michael Ondaatje’s love of the world and its wonders, the kindness he offers, the elegant lyricism of his sentences, the joy of storytelling... restore belief in the beauty and power of literature and, by extension, of humanity

Aleksandar Hemon, author of The Lazarus Project

Michael Ondaatje defies the normal distinction between poet and novelist. His writing is consistently tuned to a visionary pitch

My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje

Dazzling...This collection radiates the joy of a fully realized, literary life

A Year of Last Things contains moments of great skill… Ondaatje has a special knack for sensation and for conveying the feeling of something inexorably being taken away

With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje returns to poetry, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery 
 
'My life always stops for a new book by him' JHUMPA LAHIRI 
 
'A generous, moving book' GUARDIAN 
 
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 there since, these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world &ndash; 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 Molière&rsquo;s chair during his last stage performance, from icons in Bulgarian churches to the Californian coast and loved Canadian rivers, merging memory with the present, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss. 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-free stanzas 
and the telephone numbers 
of his children in far cities 
 
Poetry &ndash; where language is made to work hardest and burns with a gem-like flame - is what Ondaatje has returned to in this intimate history.

Michael Ondaatje

Praise for A Year of Last Things

After a break of nearly 20 years, Ondaatje has returned to poetry, ruminating on sliding doors moments in life… This is a generous, moving book

Extraordinarily attuned to hauntings… Ondaatje is a connoisseur – and creator – of atmospheres… Wonderful

Each new book of Michael Ondaatje’s is a literary event, but that is particularly true for his books of poetry. In A Year of Last Things he comes close to writing something like a timeless poem, “a mem ...

After a break of nearly 20 years, Ondaatje has returned to poetry, ruminating on sliding doors moments in life… This is a generous, moving book

Extraordinarily attuned to hauntings… Ondaatje is a connoisseur – and creator – of atmospheres… Wonderful

Each new book of Michael Ondaatje’s is a literary event, but that is particularly true for his books of poetry. In A Year of Last Things he comes close to writing something like a timeless poem, “a mem ...

After a break of nearly 20 years, Ondaatje has returned to poetry, ruminating on sliding doors moments in life… This is a generous, moving book

Extraordinarily attuned to hauntings… Ondaatje is a connoisseur – and creator – of atmospheres… Wonderful

Each new book of Michael Ondaatje’s is a literary event, but that is particularly true for his books of poetry. In A Year of Last Things he comes close to writing something like a timeless poem, “a mem ...

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Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

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