Warlight

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018.

In his first novel since The Cat’s Table, Michael Ondaatje relates a story of lives built and undone in the closing hours and long aftermath of the Second World War.

‘The ending of wars is always kind of a treacherous time… all these deals are being made, contracts are being signed… all those hidden things that go on.’ – Michael Ondaatje, Interviewed in The Toronto Star.

In a narrative as mysterious as memory itself - at once both shadowed and luminous - Warlight is a vivid, thrilling novel of violence and love, intrigue and desire.

It is 1945, and London is still reeling from the Blitz and years of war. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are apparently abandoned by their parents, left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth.

They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women with a shared history, all of whom seem determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be?

A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all he didn't know or understand in that time, and it is this journey - through reality, recollection, and imagination - that is told in this magnificent novel.

Dickensian in its scope and ambition Warlight returns to many of the themes that inhabited Michael Ondaatje’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient. The result is an intensely affecting novel of memory and fragmented identity set at a pivotal historic moment of flux.