Metro Reco: Divisadero

Michael Ondaatje takes his time crafting his beautiful prose (his last novel, Anil’s Ghost, was published in 2000). So when I came home from my trip to find Divisadero had arrived in the mail, I was thrilled.

In the three-part novel, readers are transported from present to past and back again. Lives intersect and stories merge, from 1970’s California and the stories of motherless sisters Claire and Anna and farm-hand Coop, who are irrevocably changed in an act of violence, to the dangerous lives of professional gamblers in Vegas, to the story of Lucien Segura, a writer in turn of the century France.

Divisadero explores familiar themes of Ondaatje’s work—the bonds of family, memory, passion, the impact of the past on the present, the necessity of art.

Lyrical, magical, erotic and captivating, Divisadero is not one to miss.

Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, raised in London. He moved to Canada in 1962 and began teaching at York University in 1971. He won the Booker prize in 1992 for The English Patient, and the Giller prize for Anil’s Ghost in 2000. In the Skin of a Lion, a fictional account of immigrant workers in early Toronto, was selected as the first "Canada Reads" novel in 2002. He and his wife Linda live in Toronto.