From the Publisher
Following the phenomenal success of Michael Ondaatje's Booker
Prize-winning third novel, The English Patient,
expectations were almost insurmountable. The internationally
acclaimed #1 bestseller had made Ondaatje the first Canadian
novelist ever to win the Booker. Four years later, in 1996, a
motion picture based on the book brought the story to a vast new
audience. The film, starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche,
went on to win numerous prizes, among them nine Academy Awards,
including Best Picture. Worldwide English-language sales of the
book topped two million copies.
But in April 2000, Anil's Ghost was widely hailed
as Ondaatje's most powerful and engrossing novel to date. Winning a
Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, the Kiriyama Pacific
Rim Book Prize and the Giller Prize, Anil's Ghost
became an international bestseller. "Nowhere has Ondaatje written
more beautifully," said The New York Times Book
Review.
The setting is Sri Lanka. Steeped in centuries of cultural
achievement and tradition, the country has been ravaged in the late
twentieth century by bloody civil war. As in The English
Patient, Ondaatje's latest novel follows a woman's attempt
to piece together the lost life of a victim of war. Anil Tissera,
born in Sri Lanka but educated in England and the U.S., is sent by
an international human rights group to participate in an
investigation into suspected mass political murders in her
homeland. Working with an archaeologist, she discovers a skeleton
whose identity takes Anil on a fascinating journey that involves a
riveting mystery. What follows, in a novel rich with character,
emotion, and incident, is a story about love and loss, about
family, identity and the unknown enemy. And it is a quest to unlock
the hidden past - like a handful of soil analyzed by an
archaeologist, the story becomes more diffuse the farther we reach
into history.
A universal tale of the casualties of war, unfolding as a detective
story, the book gradually gives way to a more intricate exploration
of its characters, a symphony of loss and loneliness haunted by a
cast of solitary strangers and ghosts. The atrocities of a
seemingly futile, muddled war are juxtaposed against the ancient,
complex and ultimately redemptive culture and landscape of Sri
Lanka.
Anil's Ghost is Michael Ondaatje''s first novel to
be set in the country of his birth. "There's a tendency with us in
England and North America to say it's a book 'about Sri Lanka.' But
it's just my take on a few characters, a personal tunnelling into
that … The book's not just about Sri Lanka; it's a story that's
very familiar in other parts of the world" - in Africa, in
Yugoslavia, in South America, in Ireland. "I didn't want it to be a
political tract. I wanted it to be a human study of people in the
midst of fear."
