Michael Ondaatje

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Minnesota

Fleeing the violence that destroyed her family and separated her from her sister Claire and Coop, an enigmatic young man who lives with them, Anna finds refuge in an isolated house in south-central France, while she struggles to reconcile the past and pre

Divisadero

10cf6805-9b4f-44cd-bd1b-7e4447fc20d1

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Boarding a 1950s ship and sequestered to an out-of-sight dining table with other marginalized children, an eleven-year-old boy shares rollicking adventures while traveling to various world regions, learning about jazz, women, and a shackled prisoner along the way.

The Cat's Table

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California

Texas

Poems

From one of the most influential writers of his generation, a gorgeously surprising poetry collection about memory, history, and the act of looking back Following several of his internationally acclaimed novels, A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje’s long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes witty, sometimes moving, and always wise, we journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and the abandoned landscapes we hold on to to rediscover the influence of every border crossed. Moving from a Sri Lankan boarding school to Molière’s chair during his last stage performance, to Bulgarian churches and their icons, to the California coast and his beloved Canadian rivers, Michael Ondaatje casts a brilliant eye that merges memory with the present, in the way memory as the distant shores of art and lost friends continue to influence everything that surrounds him. From his poem "His chair, a narrow bed, a motel room, the fox": At the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles Sam Cooke was shot dead. ‘See that shadow on the wall . . .’ All those motels and hotels in literature and song, where X wrote this, where Y got drunk, where Z overdosed. The one Hank Williams was driven past, dead already in his car. The Slavianski Bazaar Hotel in "The Lady with a Dog," where Dmitri imagines their dark but hopeful future. The Hôtel de ville de Courtrai, where Verlaine shot Rimbaud. The Casa Verdi in Milan, where retired opera singers were welcomed along with various heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa in their afterlife.

A Year of Last Things

186130b7-f2df-42ba-9f12-709971716c3d-0

Clean copy in good condition. Promptly shipped!

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

New York

With his first novel since the internationally acclaimedThe English Patient, Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing. The time is our own time. The place is Sri Lanka, the island nation formerly known as Ceylon, off the southern tip of India, a country steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition--and forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war and the consequences of a country divided against itself. Into this maelstrom steps a young woman, Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to work with local officials to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. Bodies are discovered. Skeletons. And particularly one, nicknamed 'Sailor.' What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past--all propelled by a riveting mystery. Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka's landscape and ancient civilization,Anil's Ghostis a literary spellbinder--the most powerful novel we have yet had from Michael Ondaatje.

Anil's Ghost

24896e2d-b9e5-416b-ad7f-61e9d3bd5c3c-1

Like-new copy with some very light edge wear, as pictured.

Vermont

Used bookstore price on inside page (in pencil). Small scuff on back cover.

Bringing to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players--some say the originator of jazz--who was, in any case, the genius, the guiding spirit, and the king of that time and place.

In this fictionalized meditation, Bolden, an unrecorded father of Jazz, remains throughout a tantalizingly ungraspable phantom, the central mysteries of his life, his art, and his madness remaining felt but never quite pinned down. Ondaatje's prose is at times startlingly lyrical, and as he chases Bolden through documents and scenes, the novel partakes of the very best sort of modern detective novel--one where the enigma is never resolved, but allowed to manifest in its fullness. Though more 'experimental' in form than either The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion, it is a fitting addition to the renowned Ondaatje oeuvre.

Coming Through Slaughter

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Florida

In his novels, poetry, and memoirs, Booker Prize winner Michael Ondaatje moves from the blasted landscape of Billy the Kid in 1880s New Mexico to the New Orleans jazz world of the legendary Buddy Bolden at the turn of the century, from his native Sri Lanka to the African desert of World War II. Compassionate, lyrical, spellbinding, the work he has created unfolds with mystery and eloquence and enlarges our literature. Included in Vintage Ondaatje are portions of the novels Anil’s Ghost, In the Skin of the Lion, Coming Through Slaughter, and The English Patient; the memoir Running in the Family; sections from The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; and a selection of the poetry. Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers, presented in attractive, affordable paperback editions.

Vintage Ondaatje

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Three individuals--nurse Hana, thief Caravaggio, and Kip--are brought together in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II by a nameless and hideously burned English patient. Reprint.

The English Patient

491cd4ec-604f-468e-9e47-1187ffb169bb-1

Rare signed first edition in excellent condition. 

Boarding a 1950s ship and sequestered to an out-of-sight dining table with other marginalized children, an 11-year-old boy shares rollicking adventures while traveling to various world regions, learning about jazz, women and a shackled prisoner along the way. By the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient. 100,000 first printing.

The Cat's Table—Signed 

Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. 256 pp.

In the Skin of a Lion

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Stunning first UK edition, first printing. Signed by the author on the title page. Unread. No markings, not remaindered. Not ex-library. Dustjacket protected in Mylar. A lovely collectible copy. Only the slightest yellowing to the page deck—so little I’m sure most dealers wouldn’t bother to mention it. See photo. 

Arizona

Signed copy

'Our book of the year - and maybe of Ondaatje's career' Daily Telegraph Books of the Year **LONGLISTED 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

Warlight SIGNED

bdede750-55d2-43c3-9a0d-efc095c00499

Connecticut

A Novel

Warlight

Colorado

With unsettling beauty and intelligence, this Golden Man Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II.

The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the center of his labyrinth lies the English patient, nameless and hideously burned, a man who is both a riddle and a provocation to his companions--and whose memories of suffering, rescue, and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.

A forensic pathologist returns to Sri Lanka--after 15 years abroad--to assist in identifying victims of the country's civil war.

Alabama

Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

A collection of conversations and dialogues between the author and Academy Award-winning film and sound editor Walter Murch offers a revealing, inside look at how films are put together, from the various working styles of such directors as Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, to the techniques and creative art of editing film. 25,000 first printing.

The Conversations

69e9b6b4-c5d4-456b-9973-4f958b623013-1

Washington

Pennsylvania

South Carolina

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Notable Book An NPR Best Book of the Year It is 1945, and London is still reeling from years of war. Fourteen-year-old Nathaniel and his older sister, Rachel, seemingly abandoned by their parents, have been left in the care of an enigmatic figure they call The Moth. They suspect he may be a criminal and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women with a shared history, all of whom seem determined now to protect and educate (in rather unusual ways) the siblings. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And how should Nathaniel and Rachel feel when their mother returns without their father after months of silence--explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all he didn't know or understand during that time, and it is this journey--through reality, recollection, and imagination--that is told in this magnificent novel.

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