Best Selling Books by Michael Ondaatje

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, author of The Namesake ''Timeless... Remarkable, incomparable'' TERRANCE HAYES, author of So to Speak 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 – 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’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 – where language is made to work hardest and burns with a gem-like flame - is what Ondaatje has returned to in this intimate history.

This highly acclaimed anthology is an unexpected and discerning mix of traditional short stories and untraditional tales, as selected by one of Canada''s most beloved writers, Michael Ondaatje. He has chosen 49 stories by a wide array of writers including Alistair MacLeod, Margaret Laurence, Carol Shields, Dionne Brand, Mavis Gallant, Stephen Leacock, Glenn Gould, Alice Munro, Rohinton Mistry, David Adams Richards and many more. Full of diversity and surprise, these writings reveal the geographical, emotional and literary range of the country. Above all, Michael Ondaatje''s personal selection offers good reading and great entertainment.

Ondaatje''s novel, Anil''s Ghost, presents readers with a human face to a complicated political event, the civil war in Sri Lanka, in the last century. Although a cease-fire was declared in 2002, this war continues in many ways. Ondaatje presents an intimate and detailed picture of the costs and pain of civil war as uncovered through the novel''s main character, Anil, a Sri-Lankan born, American trained forensic anthropologist. Bookclub-in-a-Box will guide readers through the timely and timeless questions that Ondaatje poses about the nature of war, a topic which is extremely relevant to today''s troubled world.

With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje''s Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.