by Michael Ondaatje
Find out more about this book and author:
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Published: 2018
Publisher: Knopf
Genre: Literary, Historical, War
Hardback: 304
Rating: 5
First sentence(s):
In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.
In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself--shadowed and luminous at once--we read 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 war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings' mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is this journey--through facts, recollection, and imagination--that he narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers of our time.
My two-bits:
Loved how this story unfolds with the reveal of the mystery of the protagonist's mother. The sense of time and place and characters comes alive.
* part of the Tournament of Books 2019 (here)
