Anil's Ghost

By: Michael Ondaatje

Narrated by: Alan Cumming

In his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient – winner of the Booker Prize and the Governor General’s Award – Michael Ondaatje gives us Anil’s Ghost, a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing.

The time is our own time. The place, Sri Lanka, the island nation off the southern tip of India, a country formerly known as Ceylon, which is 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 Tissera, born in Sri Lanka, educated in the West, a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human-rights group to work with local officials to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island.

Bodies are discovered. Skeletons. And particularly one, nicknamed “Sailor.” What follows, in a novel vivid with character and event, is a story about love, about family, about loss, about the unknown enemy and the quest to unlock the hidden past – all propelled by a riveting mystery.

Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka’s landscape and ancient civilization, Anil’s Ghost is a literary spellbinder – a timeless work of art and a revelatory journey.

Critic reviews

“Unquestionably Ondaatje’s finest work. . . . Read this book. Be changed.”
–Globe and Mail

“A truly wondrous book.”
–Ariel Dorfman

“It may well be the capstone of his career.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An exquisitely imagined journey.”
–Time

“A great book of our time. . . . As in a line Neruda once wrote, Ondaatje cups his hands around the live coal of life.”
–Dionne Brand

“Anil’s Ghost is all about the grief of love, all along one culture’s stony shoulder. Ondaatje’s luminous art is to have you see it and feel it all along your own.”
–Winnipeg Free Press

“There is much to astonish, to disturb and to admire. . . . A rare triumph. . . . [Ondaatje] makes the mysteries of silence speak with the force of his words.”
–Guardian (U.K.)

“A deeply moving, powerfully affective, wonderfully evocative work.”
–Edmonton Journal

“Sinuous, intelligent, graceful.”
–Sunday Telegraph (U.K.)