Michael Ondaatje

In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the "cat's table"--as far from the Captain's Table as can be--with a ragtag group of "insignificant" adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed...

A man tells the story of his boyhood in the Canadian backwoods, of his arrival in the bustling Toronto of the 1920s, and of the fabulous adventures he underwent there.

An autobiographical journey of discovery gathers together fragments of memory, experience, and family history in order to understand the meaning of his parents' legacy and his own heritage.

The story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the...

A fictionalized story of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden, a cornet player in turn-of-the-century New Orleans who cut hair by day, played music by night, and went mad at the age of thiry-one.