In his Booker Prize-winning third novel, The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje explored the nature of love and betrayal in wartime. His fourth, Anil's Ghost, is also set during a war, but unlike in World War II, the enemy is difficult to identify in the bloody sectarian upheaval that ripped Sri Lanka apart in the 1980s and '90s. The protagonist, Anil Tissera, a native Sri Lankan, left her homeland at 18 and returns to it 15 years later only as part of an international human rights fact-finding mission. In the intervening years she has become a forensic anthropologist--a career that has landed her in the killing fields of Central America, digging up the victims of Guatemala's dirty war. Now she's come to Sri Lanka on a similar quest. But as she soon learns, there are fundamental differences between her previous assignment and this one: The bodies turn up weekly now. The height of the terror was 'eighty-eight and 'eighty-nine, but of course it was going on long before that. Every side was killing and hiding the evidence. Every side. This is an unofficial war, no one wants to alienate the foreign powers. So it's secret gangs and squads. Not like Central America. The government was not the only one doing the killing. In such a situation, it's difficult to know who to trust. Anil's colleague is one Sarath Diyasena, a Sri Lankan archaeologist whose political affiliations, if any, are murky. Together they uncover evidence of a government-sponsored murder in the shape of a skeleton they nickname Sailor. But as Anil begins her investigation into the events surrounding Sailor's death, she finds herself caught in a web of politics, paranoia, and tragedy.

Like its predecessor, the novel explores that territory where the personal and the political intersect in the fulcrum of war. Its style, though, is more straightforward, less densely poetical. While many of Ondaatje's literary trademarks are present--frequent shifts in time, almost hallucinatory imagery, the gradual interweaving of characters' pasts with the present--the prose here is more accessible. This is not to say that the author has forgotten his poetic roots; subtle, evocative images abound. Consider, for example, this description of Anil at the end of the day, standing in a pool of water, "her toes among the white petals, her arms folded as she undressed the day, removing layers of events and incidents so they would no longer be within her." In Anil's Ghost Michael Ondaatje has crafted both a brutal examination of internecine warfare and an enduring meditation on identity, loyalty, and the unbreakable hold the past exerts over the present. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly
While he is generally considered a Canadian writer, Booker Prize-winner Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, and he has chosen to set his powerful and resonant new novel in that country during its gruesome civil war in the mid-1980s. Written in his usual cryptic, elliptical style, much of the story is told in flashbacks, with Ondaatje hinting at secrets even as he divulges facts, revealing his characters' motivations through their desperate or passionate behavior and, most of all, conveying the essence of a people, a country and its history via individual stories etched against a background of natural beauty and human brutality. Anil Tessira, a 33-year-old native Sri Lankan who left her country 15 years before, is a forensic pathologist sent by the U.N. human rights commission to investigate reports of mass murders on the island. Atrocities are being committed by three groups: the government, anti-government insurgents, and separatist guerrillas. Working secretly, these warring forces are decimating a population paralyzed by pervasive fear. Taciturn archeologist Sarath Diyasena is assigned by the government to be Anil's partner; at 49, he is emotionally withdrawn from the chaotic contemporary world, reserving his passion for the prehistoric shards of his profession. Together, Anil and Sarath discover that a skeleton interred among ancient bones in a government-protected sanctuary is that of a recently killed young man. Anil defiantly sets out to document this murder by identifying the victim and then making an official report. Throughout their combined forensic and archeological investigation, detailed by Ondaatje with the meticulous accuracy readers will remember from descriptions of the bomb sapper's procedures in The English Patient, Sarath remains a mysterious figure to Anil. Her confusion about his motives is reinforced when she meets his brother, Gamini, an emergency room doctor who is as intimately involved in his country's turmoil as Sarath refuses to be. The lives of these characters, and of others in their orbits, emerge circuitously, layer by layer. In the end, Anil's moral indignation--and her innocence--place her in exquisite danger, and Sarath is moved to a life-defining sacrifice. Here the narrative, whose revelations have been building with a quiet ferocity, assumes the tension of a thriller, its chilling insights augmented by the visceral emotional effects that masterful literature can provide. More effective than a documentary, Ondaatje's novel satisfies one of the most exalted purposes of fiction: to illuminate the human condition through pity and terror. It may well be the capstone of his career. 200,000 first printing; Random House audio. (May) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
YA-Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist, returns to her homeland of Sri Lanka as a member of an international human-rights group investigating abuses that occurred during the country's decade-long civil war. She teams up with Sarath Diyasena, an archaeologist who works for the Sri Lankan government. Together they unearth a skeleton and, using their skills and training, patiently piece together parts of the man's life and violent death. Along the way, they each deal with ghosts of their own. Ondaatje weaves the present time of the story, sometime in the 1990s, with plenty of flashbacks to the characters' pasts. Several of the murders are mentioned in enough detail to relate how the victim was tortured, but none of the specifics are described. Intensely written, the book skillfully conveys the tension, fear, and stress Anil and Sarath feel as they discover the past life, another ghost, of the skeleton they have found. The author shows the hopelessness and inability of the general population to find any way of stopping the unrelenting massacres, all in the name of politics and beliefs. He deftly describes the effects of war on individuals, a nation, and a people as an entity. Young, attractive Anil and her story should appeal to teens who are interested in human rights, and have seen the movie or read Ondaatje's The English Patient.Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In this lush yet acerbic new novel by OndaatjeDtrumpeted as his first since The English Patient and, interestingly, the first he has set in his native Sri LankaDAnil returns home after 15 years. Hers is not a sentimental journey, however. Anil is a forensic specialist who has recently been unearthing mass graves in Guatemala, and her mission in Sri Lanka is to conduct a human rights investigation. (In the late 1980s and early 1990s, government, antigovernment, and separatist forces clashed to produce countless deaths.) Anil is teamed with archaeologist Sarath Diyasena in an intimate yet uneasy alliance; she is never quite sure where he stands politically, as he is smart enough to have kept his head down. In a government-protected archaeological preserve, they find a skeleton that is assuredly not prehistoric, and Anil is up and running to discover its identity. The reluctant Sarath follows her lead, and as the country's recent tortured history is unfolded, he introduces her to a number of people who help them, including his own black-sheep brother, a doctor. In the end, their efforts come to nothing, and Sarath pays a supreme sacrifice to protect the sometimes puzzlingly na ve Anil. In fact, as the novel closes, it is the relationship and reconciliation of Sarath and his brother that, touchingly, takes center stage; Anil and her plight (we've heard about her abortive love life, her mortally ill friend) just fade. This powerful novel will educate even sophisticated readers who think they understand human brutality. Though it falls apart structurally toward the end, dissipating its energy as it fragments, this is still better (and more important) reading than much of what is out there.-DBarbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Richard Eder
Anil's Ghost is more tightly focused than The English Patient, and not as wide-ranging. It has one or two dead spots. Ultimately, though, it overwhelms in much the same way.

From Booklist
Once upon a time, when one thought of Sri Lanka, one imagined an island paradise. The very name is lovely. How many of us know that since 1983 a ferocious ethnic war between Buddhists and Hindus has torn the island apart and wrought nearly 70,000 casualties? The poet-writer Ondaatje, who lives in Toronto, was born in Sri Lanka. Anil's Ghost, his first novel since the widely acclaimed English Patient (1992), is about the horrible war in his native land. Ondaatje's peripatetic storytelling--the constant shifts from one character or bit of business to another and his poetic sensibilities that tease out just the right words to memorialize his characters--proves perfect for this story. Anil Tissera is a forensic pathologist, born in Sri Lanka and educated in the U.S., who returns as a representative of a human rights organization. In her Sri Lankan youth, "Anil had been an exceptional swimmer . . . and the family never got over it; the talent was locked to her for life." Anil has come to work with Sarath Diyasena, an archaeologist, who on their first meeting greets her with, "So--you are the swimmer!" Their search for the group behind the organized murders on the island is the main plot and the conduit for revealing the nature of the war. Through Anil and Sarath, readers meet the physician Gamini (also Sarath's brother) and spend much time with him on M*A*S*H-like forays into the bloody pit of war; members of the persistent Hindu Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam; and the lost artist Ananda Udugama, who helps Anil and Sarath create a face and identity for the skeleton "Sailor." Ondaatje's plea in this work, circuitous and beautifully told, is simple--a prerequisite of life is proof of existence. Bonnie Smothers

From Kirkus Reviews
The aftershocks of the recent bloody civil war in Sri Lanka, and of doomed efforts to name and remember that afflicted country's ``disappeared,'' are explored with commanding poetic intensity in this striking latest from the Canadian (and Sri Lankanborn) author of (this novel's immediate predecessor) The English Patient (1992). As he did in that earlier tale, Ondaatje analyzes the effects of political catastrophe on several deeply involved characters brought randomlyand explosivelytogether. Anil Tissera, a ``forensic anthropologist'' who had emigrated to America and now works for an international Human Rights organization, returns to her homeland to participate in an investigation into suspected mass political murders. She is assigned to work with Sarath Diyasenaa phlegmatic archaeologist whose own political affiliations remain cloudyand is soon involved in the process of ``restoring'' skeletons officially declared ``prehistoric remains'' (though it's obvious they're the remains of recently deceased victims of torture). Ondaatje's plot is mined with ingenious surprises, but the storys structure is relentlessly meditative and ruminativeas becomes apparent when it expands to include other principal characters: Sarath's younger brother Gamini, a doctor abducted by rebel insurgents, who shares with Sarath a history of fraternal intrigue and sexual rivalry; Sarath's mentor Palipana, a venerable ``epigraphist'' (i.e., an interpreter of ancient ruins) who has become a blind recluse; and Ananda Udagama, an ``eye-painter turned drunk gem-pit worker turned head-restorer,'' whose unusual artistry is commandeered in the violent climactic pages. The actions and thoughts of these and several other dramatically conceived characters often exude a hallucinatory power; and as often, unfortunately, drain away the story's immediacy, in capriciously positioned flashbacks burdened with explaining their past lives and present interrelationships. The reader becomes lost in thickets of speculation and reverie. Impressive and often fascinating, but not a success. There's ample evidence that Ondaatje worked diligently, and perhaps for several years, on Anil's Ghost. But he doesn't seem to have finished it. (First printing of 200,000) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
“Gorgeously exotic…. As he did in The English Patient, Mr. Ondaatje is able to commingle anguish and seductiveness in fierce, unexpected ways.”–The New York Times


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Review
?Gorgeously exotic?. As he did in The English Patient, Mr. Ondaatje is able to commingle anguish and seductiveness in fierce, unexpected ways.??The New York Times


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Book Description
Read by Alan Cumming
7 CDs, 8 hours
From the author of The English Patient and winner of the Booker Prize, the Canada Australia Prize, and the Canada Governor General's Award, comes a new novel of electric artistry and impact confirming Michael Ondaatje's reputation as one of the world's foremost writers.

The time is our own time. The place Sri Lanka, the island nation off the southern tip of India, a country formerly known as Ceylon, steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition smf forced into the late 20th century by the ravages of civil war and the consequences of a government divided against itself.

Into this maelstrom steps a young woman, Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka, educated in 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, in a novel rich with character, emotion, and incident, is a story about love, about family, about identity and the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past and all propelled by a riveting mystery.

Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka's landscape and ancient civilization, Anil's Ghost is a compelling literary spellbinder and worthy successor to The English Patient, a novel admired and treasured by countless readers around the world.

Download Description
With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The 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 Ghost is a literary spellbinder--the most powerful novel we have yet had from Michael Ondaatje.

From the Publisher
"Michael Ondaatje's novels swing on fiction's rope--they launch into a flight of myth, and are caught up once more in agile narrative hands. Like trapeze artists, they fly from one arm-straining gravity to another, across a shocking gap of weightlessness . . . Nowhere has Ondaatje written more beautifully . . . It is his extraordinary achievement to use magic in order to make the blood of his own country real."-- Richard Eder, New York Times Book Review
"You'll have to remind yourself to keep breathing as you read this book . . . Ondaatje is a master at portraying unconsummated desire--for love, truth, or peace."-- Christian Science Monitor
"Another potential blockbuster. Anil's Ghost is an incandescent murder mystery wrapped in the enigmatic political cloak of moral transgressions . . . It is virtually flawless, with impeccable regional details, startlingly original characters and a compelling literary plot that borders on the thriller. Ondaatje's stunning achievement is to produce an idelible novel of dangerous beauty."-- USA Today
"Ondaatje's willingness to look human suffering in the face is one of his compelling virtues, and gives his dreamlike montages their stern depth."-- John Updike, The New Yorker
"Ondaatje's peripatetic storytelling--the constant shifts from one character or bit of business to another and his poetic sensibilities that tease out just the right works to memorialize his characters--proves perfect for this story . . . Ondaatje's plea in this work, circuitous and beautifully told, is simple--a prerequisite of life is proof of existence."-- Booklist (starred review)
"Powerful and resonant... The narrative, whose revelations have been building with a quiet ferocity, assumes the tension of a thriller, its chilling insights augmented by the visceral emotional effects that masterful literature can provide. More effective than a documentary, Ondaatje's novel satisfies one of the most exalted purposes of fiction: to illuminate the human condition through pity and terror. It may well be the capstone of his career.... Masterful."-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A truly wondrous book. The layers of human history, the depth of the human body, the heartache of love and fratricide have rarely been conveyed with such dignity and translucence. I was enthralled as I have not been since The English Patient."-- Ariel Dorfman
"Elegant prose and deft handling of character bring this tale of political and personal unrest to a stirring resolution." -- Vanity Fair
"An exquisitely imagined journey through the hellish consequences of impassioned intentions...Anil's stubborn pursuit of this goal evolves as a sort of forensic thriller...The uncanny power of Anil's Ghost stems largely from Ondaatje's refusal to frame his tale as a struggle of good and evil... Condemnation seems too simple a response to the complex horrors he portrays." -- TIME Magazine
"Utterly riveting." -- Glamour
Absolutely magical...The narrative races along, a hardheaded, softhearted thriller...The language throughout is tremendously lyrical, but it never chokes the story with too much perfume...It displays the fine particularity of genuine literature." -- Mirabella
"Michael Ondaatje breaks the rules. He forces the novel to do things it isn't supposed to do and he gets away with it. His fiction plays an elusive and dazzling game of tag with a dreamlike other reality . . . Anil's Ghost is an impressive achievement. Like all of his books, it is a work of high moral and aesthetic seriousness, suffused with a deep affection for and understanding of human beings and compassion for their lot."-- Salon.com
"It sucks you in like a high-class thriller yet has an imagistic richness lusher than any film...His sensuous prose transports us to a land ravaged by death and pulsing with beauty; you can almost hear the whirring cicadas...A meditation on how human beings learn to deal with the weight of the past, the pain of the present, and the yearning for spiritual release. Life-embracing and wise."-- Vogue
"Ondaatje's most mature and engrossing novel...A searing, compassionate novel of extraordinary beauty." -- Daily News
"Anil's Ghost has to be the best thing he has ever done.... It unfolds as a detective tale...The details of forensic analysis is an ongoing, fascinating fabric of the book...Ondaatje produces a timelessness that is sustainingly moving...But what is most compelling is the power of language.... Ondaatje is a magnificent writer. Precision of expression, concision of thought, cleanness, clarity of detail permeate every page. He is a storyteller, and his stories work marvelously, but he is also a thinker, an explorer, a seeker of truth...The reader is drawn deeply to the importance and dignity of the physician's task, of healing but more than that of saving."-- Baltimore Sun
"Ondaatje is a choreographer of images, finding within the darkening plain of history a forest of infinite possibility...What gives Ondaatje's writing its particular weight and magic is the labyrinthine consciousness at its center...It offers imagery of terrible beauty...A novel of exquisite refractions and angles: gorgeous but circumspect, trying to capture the essential truth by always looking first to its reflection."-- Boston Globe
"There is much to astonish, to disturb and to admire...Ondaatje's ability to create deeply moving fictions through indirection is a rare triumph: a poet in the skin of a novelist, he makes the mysteries of silence speak with the force of his words."-- The Guardian, London
"Ondaatje remains a first-class writer. The prose is a joy . . . sinuous, intelligent, graceful."-- The Sunday Telegraph, London


From the Inside Flap
Read by Alan Cumming
7 CDs, 8 hours
From the author of The English Patient and winner of the Booker Prize, the Canada Australia Prize, and the Canada Governor General's Award, comes a new novel of electric artistry and impact confirming Michael Ondaatje's reputation as one of the world's foremost writers.

The time is our own time.  The place Sri Lanka, the island nation off the southern tip of India, a country formerly known as Ceylon, steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition smf forced into the late 20th century by the ravages of civil war and the consequences of a government divided against itself.

Into this maelstrom steps a young woman, Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka, educated in 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, in a novel rich with character, emotion, and incident, is a story about love, about family, about identity and the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past and all propelled by a riveting mystery.  

Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka's landscape and ancient civilization, Anil's Ghost is a compelling literary spellbinder and worthy successor to The English Patient, a novel admired and treasured by countless readers around the world.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Anil's Ghost

Halfway into Michael Ondaatje's new novel, Anil's Ghost, there is a scene so quietly devastating that it alone makes the novel worth reading. It is the mid-1980s, and a civil war is raging on the tiny island nation of Sri Lanka. Each day, fresh corpses inundate emergency medical clinics—many of them so mutilated that they are unidentifiable and can only be classified as "disappearances." Anil Tissera, a 33-year-old forensic anthropologist born in Sri Lanka and educated abroad, returns to the island as part of a United Nations human rights campaign to prove that mass murders are taking place. In the hope of identifying the corpses, she takes the unusual step of hiring a local "face painter" named Ananda, who, with mud, soot, paint, and sheer instinct, reconstructs the ghostly visage of one suspiciously disinterred body. Anil then shows the image around the local villages, hoping that it will be recognized. This grisly mask becomes Anil's Ghost, and she raises it high to reveal to the world, and the government of Sri Lanka, that she knows what has been going on.

In addition to being his best story yet, Ondaatje's tale is a similarly brave and grisly act of reanimation: It conjures a dark period in Sri Lankan history and reveals how the atrocities directly affect the three main characters. The novel begins with Anil's arrival on the island and builds outward from there. Forty-nine-year-old archaeologist Sarath Diaysena is assigned by the Sri Lankan government to be Anil's official guide, but in spite of his expertise, he never really warms to the role. Sarath wants nothing to do with stirring up trouble. Since his wife's suicide, he has withdrawn into his work, attempting to buffer himself against the horrors being perpetrated all around him. His brother Gamini, a doctor who works in the field clinics, cannot afford the luxury of denial; the grim casualties of war are wheeled into his clinic by the hour. Unlike Sarath, he knows that one day soon he will recognize one of the victims.

When Sarath and Anil leave the city for the remote villages where Ministry of Health officials rarely, if ever, go, it becomes all but impossible for Sarath to remain uninvolved. Severed heads are staked out along the roads as a warning to anyone thinking of joining the resistance. Even the reticent Sarath admits that small guerrilla groups can hardly be the cause of such widespread brutality. Gamini, meanwhile, is so overwhelmed with triage and autopsies that he turns to his own supply of pharmaceuticals in order to stay awake. Despite the obvious signs of mass murder, Sarath begs Anil not to continue her investigation. He knows how the government will respond to an outsider who tries to exhume its dirty secrets. But Anil knows that it is this very fear that must be overcome if the murders are to be stopped. When she and Sarath find a person who can help them confirm the age of a body interred in a government-controlled cave, there is no turning back.

The remainder of the novel chronicles Anil and Sarath's quest to learn the origins of this body and its identity. Even in the last 20 pages, the novel's crucial questions remain artfully suspended: How much safety is Sarath willing to sacrifice in order to bring these atrocities to light? Will the body be recognized? Will Sarath ever open up to Anil? Will either of them back down when their snooping comes to light? Anil's Ghost is the closest Ondaatje is likely to come to writing a page-turner; many readers will likely devour it in one sitting.

But what makes this more than just a thrilling tale, and invites rereadings, is the way Ondaatje textures his characters' interior lives. And this is where we get vintage Ondaatje. Using flashbacks and brilliant set pieces, Ondaatje spreads out their histories before us like a cartographer, and through this careful mapping we feel his characters' pain and disillusionment. There is Anil's growing guilt over having left Sri Lanka before the disappearances began, and her attempt to expiate that guilt by working to bring these events to light. There is Gamini's struggle to keep hope alive after so many bodies have died in his arms. And finally, there is Sarath's judicious approach to each new atrocity, an attitude that mirrors his technique of keeping a close lid on his heart.

In Ondaatje's literary universe, it is through loving that we define ourselves, and his characters reveal their essential natures by how they do and do not love. Anil has recently run out on her boyfriend after stabbing him in the arm with a small knife. The face painter Ananda's own wife is numbered among the disappearances. When reconstructing the faces of the missing, he gives each of them a serene portrayal, in the hope that his wife, too, will find peace. Sarath's wife, who killed herself at the height of the disappearances, is a more indirect casualty. At the nexus of these three characters is Gamini. Like Anil, he is living on the edge—giving his life to the cause of helping others—but unlike Sarath, he is willing to risk his heart by trying to find true love.

In Ondaatje's previous books, his characters transcended their war-ravaged condition through sexual connection. Here, however, sex is the ground upon which the political battles raging around the characters turn personal, where people learn their fates. Ultimately, what brings home the crushing truth of the atrocities is the extent to which each character gives up on romantic love. Yet in the midst of such emotional decimation, Anil never abandons her struggle to bring the murders to light. Matters of the heart are defined by what we sacrifice. And by risking everything for truth, Anil delivers her most profound expression of love to her reclaimed country.

—John Freeman

FROM THE PUBLISHER

With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Booker Prize winning author 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.

Anil￯﾿ﾽs Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past a story propelled by a riveting mystery. Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka￯﾿ﾽs landscape and ancient civilization, Anil￯﾿ﾽs Ghost is a literary spellbinder, Michael Ondaatje￯﾿ﾽs most powerful novel yet.

SYNOPSIS

With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Booker Prize￯﾿ﾽwinning author 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Time Magazine

An exquisitely imagined journey through the hellish consequences of impassioned intentions . . . The uncanny power of Anil's Ghost stems largely from Ondaatje's refusal to frame his tale as a struggle of good and evil . . . The author notes at one point the ancient rite of painting the eyes of new statues of the Buddha . . . Anil's Ghost reflects not a god's eyes but something equally unknowable.

Salon.com

Michael Ondaatje breaks the rules. He forces the novel to do things it isn't supposed to do and he gets away with it. His fiction plays an elusive and dazzling game of tag with a dreamlike other reality...Anil's Ghost is an impressive achievement. Like all of his books, it is a work of high moral and aesthetic seriousness, suffused with a deep affection for and understanding of human beings and compassion for their lot.

Robert Allen Papinchak - USA Today

Anil's Ghost is virtually flawless, with impeccable regional details, startlingly original characters and a compelling literary plot that borders on the thriller.

Keith Phipps - The Onion AV Club

If Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient was about the spaces in war that allow humanity to slip through, the same can be said of his follow-up, Anil's Ghost. That it deals with an entirely different sort of war, however, makes a great difference. Set in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje's birthplace and home to an ongoing, undeclared war between the government and various factions of rebels, Anil's Ghost concerns the efforts of Anil, a Western-trained forensics expert returning to her homeland and finding the chance to prove an unidentified skeleton the victim of government assassination. Aided at various times by an archeologist, his estranged doctor brother, and a drunken artist, she encounters obstacles at nearly every turn. Less concerned with the mystery than what it means to pursue it and what pursuing it means to each character, Ondaatje's richly textured novel explores its explosive scenario by portraying the aftermath--the weary camaraderie of the overcrowded emergency room, the haunted lives of those left behind--with the poetic grace and awareness of moral ambiguity he brought to The English Patient. In the process, Ondaatje makes his story recognizable as all too universal. "Only our weapons are state-of-the-art," a character laments at one point, and the reference could apply just as easily to Somalia or Central America. That Ondaatje musters up something like a hopeful ending says much about the generosity of spirit at work in his book, and it says even more that it can ring true after such an unflinching portrayal of violence, absurdity, and loss.

Elizabeth Bukowski - Wall Street Journal

Anil's Ghost has a collage-like structure that hops among scenes from the past and present of different characters' lives. The fragmented narrative heightens the sense that these characters only halfway inhabit their lives; the constant terrors of the war, and in Anil's case, the sudden death of her parents more than a decade earlier, have forced them to build up their emotional defenses.

Michael Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan who lives in Canada, is a master poet is evident on every page. His shimmering prose, along with the novel's surprise ending and insights into the way political turmoil affects individual lives, makes Anil's Ghost a worthy successor to The English Patient Read all 17 "From The Critics" >

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