Michael Ondaatje

'Our book of the year - and maybe of Ondaatje's career' Daily Telegraph Books of the Year **LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018** 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.

En una narració tan misteriosa i encisadora com la memòria mateix, llegim la història d'en Nathaniel, un nen de catorze anys, i la seva germana gran, la Rachel. El 1945, just després de la Segona

Set during the end of World War II, this novel explores the lives of four very disparate people who find themselves holed up together in a ruined villa north of Florence as the war retreats around them. Michael Ondaatje is the author of "Running in the Family" and "In the Skin of a Lion".

This is a novel by the Booker Prize-winning author of "The English Patient". The result is a disturbing and timeless revelatory journey.

.

En una narració tan misteriosa i encisadora com la memoria mateixa llegim la historia del Nathaniel, un nen de catorze anys, i la seva germana gran, la Rachel. El 1945, just despres de la Segona Guerra Mundial, els seus pares es traslladen a Singapur i els deixen a Londres al carrec d’un home misterios que anomenen l’Arna. Sospiten que potser es un criminal, i en van quedant mes convençuts i menys preocupats a mesura que van coneixent la seva excentrica comitiva d’amistats: homes i dones units per un passat comº durant la guerra; desconeguts que semblen decidits a protegir i educar els dos infants de les formes mes inusuals. Pero son realment qui diuen ser, i fan el que asseguren fer? Una decada mes tard, el Nathaniel comença a destapar tot allo que no sabia i no va entendre en aquells anys. Aquest viatge —a traves de fets, de recol.•leccions i d’imaginacio— es el que ens relata aquesta magnifica obra de Michael Ondaatje, un dels grans escriptors anglesos del nostre temps.

"A Magical book. Michael Ondaatje defies the normal distinction between poet and novelist. His writing is consistently tuned to a visionary pitch" - Graham Swift. It is the 1920s, and Patrick Lewis has arrived in the bustling city of Toronto, leaving behind his Canadian wilderness home. He immerses himself in the lives of the people who surround him, learning, from their stories, the history of the city itself. And he has his own adventures: searching for a missing millionaire, tunnelling beneath Lake Ontario, falling in love. In the "Skin of a Lion" is Michael Ondaatje's sparkling predecessor to his Booker Prize-winning "The English Patient". It is here that we encounter, for the first time, Hana the orphaned girl and Caravaggio the thief, among a large cast of characters who are all lovingly and intimately portrayed. It is an exquiste and musical novel, a romance that challenges the boundary between history and myth. "Ondaatje writes in curves, in time-lapses, a sort of verbal cinema whose narrative is unfaltering". - "The Times" "A triumph...a powerful and revelatory accomplishment". - "Times Literary Supplement"

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 Molieres 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 loveshe slips them into a pocket,wishes to die with his clothesfull of torn-free stanzasand the telephone numbersof his children in far citiesPoetry where language is made to work hardest and burns with a gem-like flame - is what Ondaatje has returned to in this intimate history.

.