Michael Ondaatje

Brought to you by Penguin. A breath-taking novel about love and the horrors of civil war from the bestselling author of The English Patient. 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 a bloody civil war. Enter Anil Tissera, a young woman and forensic anthropologist born in Sri Lanka but educated in the West, sent by an international human rights group to identify the victims of the murder campaigns sweeping the island.

When Anil discovers that the bones found in an ancient burial site are in fact those of a much more recent victim, her search for the terrible truth hidden in her homeland begins. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity - a story driven by a riveting mystery.

London, 1945. The capital is still reeling from the war. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel are abandoned by their parents, and left in the dubious care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. 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.

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 here 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 Moliere's chair during his last stage performance, from icons in Bulgarian churches to the California coast and loved Canadian rivers, merging memory with the present, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss.

At first sight it is a glittering collection of fragments and memories - but small, intricate pieces of a life are precisely what matter most to Ondaatje. They make an emotional history. 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 freestanzas / 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.