Warlight

Our book of the year – and maybe of Ondaatje's career.

Our book of the year – and maybe of Ondaatje's career.

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight is a rare and beautiful thing – a deeply retrospective novel about war secrets that feels neither overstated nor overly ethereal. In sumptuous prose , Ondaatje limns the psyche of a man still trying to make sense of his complicated relationships and the mysteries surrounding his absent parents. One of the most absorbing books I’ve read all year.

Warlight sucked me in deeper than any novel I can remember … fiction as rich, as beautiful, as melancholy as life itself.

From the very first sentence you’re desperate to find out what happens next … All is slowly, tantalisingly revealed, in flashbacks, fragments, digressions and stories within stories, narrated in majestic Ondaatjean style .

In Warlight we have a writer who knows exactly what he’s doing – 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.

The latest novel from the author of The English Patient is just glorious ... rendered with Dickensian verve. My hot tip for the Booker Prize.

Ondaatje’s first novel in seven years mesmerizes from start to finish.

I spend the months before the publication of a new Michael Ondaatje novel trying to keep my expectations in check, telling myself it's simply unfair to expect as much of any writer as I expect from Ondaatje. Then he pulls off a Warlight , and I'm embarrassed by my own lack of faith... [ Warlight ] is surprising, delightful, heartbreaking and written as only Ondaatje could write it.

Compulsively and grippingly readable . In fact I read it first at a gallop, enthralled by the image of a city and a world distorted and all but destroyed by war, and then again slowly, determined to savour the details and extract as much as I could from it. Much remained puzzling on this second reading, but two things are clear: Michael Ondaatje is a marvellous writer, and Warlight is a novel which will continue to play in the reader’s imagination .

Ondaatje [is] such a thrilling writer… I loved [ Warlight ].

Michael Ondaatje is the author of seven novels; a memoir, Running in the Family ; a non-fiction book on film, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film ; and several books of poetry, including The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting . The English Patient received the Booker Prize in 1992 and the Golden Man Booker in 2018, and was made into a film directed by Anthony Minghella. Anil’s Ghost was awarded the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize and the Prix Médicis. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto.