Anil's Ghost

About this book

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's 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's landscape and ancient civilization, Anil's Ghost is a literary spellbinder--Michael Ondaatje's most powerful novel yet.

Themes & subjects

About the author

Michael Ondaatje

12 September 1943

Philip Michael Ondaatje (born 12 September 1943) is a Ceylon-born Canadian poet, fiction writer and essayist. Ondaatje's literary career began with his poetry: in 1967 he published *The Dainty Monsters,* and in 1970 the critically acclaimed *The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.* His novel *The English Patient* (1992), adapted as a film in 1996, received the Booker Prize in 1992. It later won the Golden Man Booker Prize as the best of the first 51 Booker Prize winners. Ondaatje has been "fostering new Canadian writing" with two decades' commitment to Coach House Press (ca. 1970–1990), where he edited, among other authors, Daphne Marrlatt's early poems. His editorial credits include the journ…