Michael Ondaatje

Booker prize winning author Michael Ondaatje invites you on a brutal, beautiful journey into the American West. . . At twenty-one years old, Billy the Kid has killed a man for each year he's been alive. Roaming the blasted planes of the Wild West, he moves between friends, foes and lovers, fighting to keep just one step ahead of the law. Yet in this twisted wasteland - a country of mad dogs, of sweat and gore and blinding heat - the sheriffs play dirty too. Melding prose, poetry, imagined interviews and ephemeral photography, Ondaatje weaves together a lyrical reinterpretation of Billy's short, infamous existence, forming a portrait of a young man, and a young country, borne out of violence, threaded through with disaster, yet rich in wonder.

With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje returns to poetry, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery 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 Moliére’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.

Based on the life of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the legendary jazz pioneers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Coming Through Slaughter is an extraordinary recreation of a remarkable musical life and a tragic conclusion. Through a collage of memoirs, interviews, imaginary conversations and monologues, Ondaatje builds a picture of a man who would work by day at a barber shop and by night unleash his talent to wild audiences who had never experienced such playing. But Buddy was also playing the field with two women, and inside his head was a ticking time-bomb which he was unable to stop.

Známy kanadsko-srílanský spisovateľ, ktorý sa preslávil najmä románom Anglický pacient, sa vo svojej novej knihe vracia do čias krátko po druhej svetovej vojne. Rodičia štrnásťročného Nathaniela a jeho sestry Ráchel nečakane odídu a nechajú svoje deti s ľuďmi, ktorí sú možno zločinci. V atmosfére povojnového Londýna sa odohráva príbeh bezstarostnej mladosti, prvej lásky a dobrodružstiev, ktoré sa jedného dňa náhle skončia. Až o niekoľko rokov neskôr si Nathaniel skladá čriepky svojej minulosti, odhaľuje pravdu o tom, čo predtým nevedel alebo nechápal, a tá cesta ho zavedie do morálne rozporuplného, tajomného sveta.

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

In a narrative as mysterious as memory itself - at once both shadowed and luminous - Warlight is a vivid, thrilling novel of violence and love, intrigue and desire. It is 1945, and London is still reeling from the Blitz and years of war. 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 with a shared history, all of whom seem determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all he didn't know or understand in that time, and it is this journey - through reality, recollection, and imagination - that is told in this magnificent novel.

A beautiful new limited edition paperback of The English Patient, published as part of the Bloomsbury Modern Classics list A small cargo plane will come down to land, slipping from the level of the horizon. It tips its wings within desert light and then sound stops, it drifts to earth. The final curtain is closing on the Second World War and in an abandoned Italian villa Hana, a nurse, tends to her sole remaining patient. Rescued from a burning plane, the anonymous Englishman is damaged beyond recognition and haunted by painful memories. The only clue Hana has to unlocking his past is the one thing he clung on to through the fire - a copy of The Histories by Herodotus, covered with hand-written notes detailing a tragic love affair.

Kto je zranený vojak v opustenej vile v Toskánsku? Svoje meno si nepamätá a hovorí, že je Angličan. Jeho ošetrovateľka Hana je unavená smrťou, a preto až priveľmi lipne na mužovi, ktorého sa usiluje zachrániť. Osud oboch sa nečakane zmení, keď sa v dome zjaví zlodej Caravaggio a indický ženista Kip. Caravaggio a Hana postupne odhaľujú pravú totožnosť anglického pacienta - bezmenného a zmrzačeného muža, ktorého spomienky na lásku, zradu a utrpenie osvetľujú jeho príbeh ako plamienky zhasínajúceho ohňa. Román Anglický pacient je najznámejšie dielo M. Ondaatjeho, za ktoré dostal prestížnu Bookerovu cenu a na jeho motívy vznikol rovnomenný film, ocenený Oscarom za najlepší film roka 1997.

Autor úspěšného románu i Anglický pacient /i se v jedné z nejnovějších knih vrací na svou rodnou Sri Lanku, kde se minulost vytesaná do kamene prolíná s krutou přítomností. Pokud by nyní měla vstoupit do jiného života a vrátit se do země, kterou si zvolila, nakolik by Gamini a vzpomínka na Saratha zůstali její součástí? Povídala by si o nich s přáteli, o těch dvou colombských bratrech? A ona mezi nimi, tak trochu jako sestra, která jim brání, aby pošlapali svět toho druhého. Vzpomene si na ně, kamkoliv půjde? Bude přemýšlet o té podivné dvojici ze středních vrstev, která se narodila do jednoho světa a uprostřed života se ocitla po pás hluboko v jiném

It is the 1970s in Northern California. A farmer and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work the land with the help of Coop, the enigmatic young man who lives with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until they are riven by an incident of violence - of both hand and heart - that 'sets fire to the rest of their lives'. Anna will come to rest in the calming landscape of south-central France. There, she delves into the story of a writer who, decades earlier, lived in the isolated house she now occupies - a story that circles around the 'raw truth' of her own life, the one she's left behind but can never truly leave. And while Anna's story lies at the heart of the novel, the narrative sweeps across the terrain of the lives of Coop and Claire as well, each of them managing to find some foothold in a present rough-hewn from the past.This is a story of possession and loss, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. Written in the sensuous prose for which Michael Ondaatje's fiction is celebrated, Divisadero" is the work of a master story-teller."