Warlight: A novel by Michael Ondaatje

Description

NATIONAL BEST SELLER

From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of The English Patient: a mesmerizing new novel that tells a dramatic story set in the decade after World War II through the lives of a small group of unexpected characters and two teenagers whose lives are indelibly shaped by their unwitting involvement.

In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself–shadowed and luminous at once–we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings' mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is this journey–through facts, recollection, and imagination–that he narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers of our time.

Editoral Review

An Amazon Best Book of May 2018: First sentences matter, and Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight begins with a distinctly dramatic one. “In 1945, our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals” says 14-year-old Nathaniel, who with his older sister Rachel finds himself living in bombed-out London with two shady characters known as “The Moth” and “The Pimlico Darter.” Warlight starts with elements of a classic children’s adventure story, but its shadows run increasingly deep as Nathaniel, growing older, uncovers the network of deception that masks his mother’s spy-work. When the trail of factual discoveries grows cold, he imagines a past he can never truly know, composing, in effect, a dreamlike memoir of his “lost inheritance.” In Warlight, Ondaatje, now 74 years old, has written a wonderfully varied, blazingly literary, and gut-twistingly emotional story that will leave readers grateful for whatever solidity their own families can claim, though newly aware of the fundamental mystery of other lives. –Sarah Harrison Smith, Amazon Book Review