Divisadero
Author(s): Michael Ondaatje
It is the 1970s in Northern California. A farmer and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work the land with the help of Coop, the enigmatic young man who lives with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until they are riven by an incident of violence - of both hand and heart - that 'sets fire to the rest of their lives'. Anna will come to rest in the calming landscape of south-central France. There, she delves into the story of a writer who, decades earlier, lived in the isolated house she now occupies - a story that circles around the 'raw truth' of her own life, the one she's left behind but can never truly leave. And while Anna's story lies at the heart of the novel, the narrative sweeps across the terrain of the lives of Coop and Claire as well, each of them managing to find some foothold in a present rough-hewn from the past. This is a story of possession and loss, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. Written in the sensuous prose for which Michael Ondaatje's fiction is celebrated, Divisadero is the work of a master story-teller. First published 2007.
Product Information
A sweeping, elegiac story on the scale of The English Patient Anil's Ghost was the winner of the 2000 Giller Prize, the Prix Medicis, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, the 2001 Irish Times International Fiction Prize and Canada's Governor General's AwardThe English Patient won the Booker Prize and the Anthony Minghella film won 9 Oscars
Shortlisted for Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book - Caribbean and Canada 2008.
'One of the most innovative and liberating writers of our time.' Guardian 'Magnificent ... Ondaatje pulls off the plotlines masterfully ... He introduces memorable characters [and] scenes of majestic texture and captivating imagery ... From its first to last telling sentence, this aesthetic tale, poetic with human detail, is a rare and precious pleasure' USA Today 'Hauntingly beautiful ... What an unusual, and unusually rich, experience it is to read Divisadero. There are countless examples of perfect phrasing, and those who spend time within its pages will discover even more proof not that they needed it of Michael Ondaatje's peerlessness as a storyteller and poet' Washington Post Book World 'Divisadero is powered by narrative force and contains finely chiseled characters. [It] is also a book profuse with poetic imagery, profound themes and the delicate architecture of open verse ... Stunning bits of lyrical observation turn up on almost every page ... Breathtaking.' Chicago Sun Times
Michael Ondaatje is the author of four previous novels, a memoir, a non-fiction book on film and several books of poetry. His novel The English Patient won the Booker Prize; another of his novels, Anil's Ghost, won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Prix Medicis. Born in Sri Lanka, he now lives in Toronto.
General Fields
- :
- : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- : 01 September 2007
- : 234mm X 153mm
- : United Kingdom
- : books
Special Fields
- : Michael Ondaatje
- : Hardback
- : 507
- : Engish
- : 813.54
- : very good
- : 288
- : Modern fiction
