In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself--shadowed and luminous at once--we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric...

The time is our own time. The place is Sri Lanka, the island nation formerly known as Ceylon, off the southern tip of India, a country steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition--and forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war and the consequences of a country divided against itself. Into this maelstrom steps a young woman, Anil Tessera, born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, a forensic anthropologist...

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient comes a visionary novel about an icon of American violence. William Bonney killed his first man when he was twelve. By the time he was twenty-one he had, by his own reckoning, slain nineteen more. In the intervening years he had become "Billy the Kid," bloodthirsty ogre and outlaw saint, a boy with buck teeth and a pleasant face who could shoot a stranger calmly in the heart and walk away...

A man tells the story of his boyhood in the Canadian backwoods, of his arrival in the bustling Toronto of the 1920s, and of the fabulous adventures he underwent there.

"Following several of his internationally acclaimed, beloved novels, A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje's long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes wittily funny, moving, and always wise, we journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and abandoned landscapes we hold onto to rediscover the influence of every border crossed. Moving from a Sri Lankan...

A fictionalized story of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden, a cornet player in turn-of-the-century New Orleans who cut hair by day, played music by night, and went mad at the age of thiry-one.

At the end of World War II, a mysterious, horribly burned man who claims not to remember his name, known only as the "English patient," lies near death in an Italian villa. He is cared for by a quietly desperate young nurse, Hana, herself a victim of the war. With her at the villa are Kip, a young Sikh bomb-disposal expert, and a shadowy thief with bandaged hands named Caravaggio. The key to the burned man's past may lie in his commonplace book,...