Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka’s landscape and ancient civilization, Anil’s Ghost is a literary spellbinder - a timeless work of art and a revelatory journey. And particularly one, nicknamed “Sailor.” What follows, in a novel vivid with character and event, is a story about love, about family, about loss, about the unknown enemy and the quest to unlock the hidden past - all propelled by a riveting mystery. And because it’s by Michael Ondaatje, it does all of that with literary flair. Into this maelstrom steps a young woman, Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka, educated in the West, 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.īodies are discovered. Anil's Ghost Michael Ondaatje This dream-like detective story during the Sri Lankan Civil War of the 1980s and ’90s addresses themes like trust and deceit, the futility of war, and the way conflict can forge or dissemble identity. The place, Sri Lanka, the island nation off the southern tip of India, a country formerly known as Ceylon, which is steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition - and forced into the late 20th century by the ravages of civil war and the consequences of a country divided against itself. In his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient - winner of the Booker Prize and the Governor General’s Award - Michael Ondaatje gives us Anil’s Ghost, a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing.

Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje