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Only 1 copy left on sale!! Nominated for the 2007 Giller Prize.
The long-awaited new novel from Michael Ondaatje: a sweeping, elegiac story on the scale of The English Patient.
"The clockmaker was not my father, but he raised me. I learned I suppose a manner from him. Also that any trade or talent could be shaped discreetly without the sparks of exaggerated drama. . . . And he loved my mother. I saw him on the last days ofhis life lift that oil-scented right hand and enter its fingers into her ordered hair and rustle it free of its pins as if he had been offered velvet or the fur of a rare animal. Forever I hold that gesture. For me it was perhaps the last and essential pleasure belonging to him. It is the unspoiled core of whatever I know of love and family (and I have not been successful at the craft of it). Our shyness at embracing each other -- it rarely happened -- did not matter. I felt safe and comforted in his house. There was a calm, the two clocks in the house were silent but precise and we were safe in time. For just five years he gave us all that."
--From Divisadero
Michael Ondaatje’s eagerly anticipated new novel, Divisadero, unravels a haunting story that ranges from northern California to central France, introducing characters who become part of our own lives. Divisadero brings together all of the elements for which Michael Ondaatje’s fiction is celebrated.
The spellbinding story begins in the 1970s, in the western U.S. — on a farm in northern California near to what had been Gold Rush country, and then moving into the raucous world of Nevada’s casinos. There is a father; a daughter, Anna; an adopted sister, Claire; and an enigmatic young man named Coop. A traumatic event unexpectedly shatters their makeshift family and sets each of them on a separate course until, years later; the past once again enters their lives. The novel’s breathtaking second part unfolds in the stark landscape of south-central France, where Anna discovers echoes of old memories in the story of a wellknown writer, Lucien Segura, who lived at one time in the small, isolated house she occupies — a story that leads back to the
early part of the century.
Michael Ondaatje is the author of the novels In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter,The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost. His other books include Running in the Family, The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting. He lives in Toronto.
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