Warlight

Our book of the year – and maybe of Ondaatje's career. * Daily Telegraph **Books of the Year** *
Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight is a rare and beautiful thing – a deeply retrospective novel about war secrets that feels neither overstated nor overly ethereal. In sumptuous prose, Ondaatje limns the psyche of a man still trying to make sense of his complicated relationships and the mysteries surrounding his absent parents. One of the most absorbing books I’ve read all year. -- Esi Edugyan * Times Literary Supplement **Books of the Year 2018** *
Warlight sucked me in deeper than any novel I can remember… fiction as rich, as beautiful, as melancholy as life itself. -- Alex Preston * Observer *
From the very first sentence you’re desperate to find out what happens next… All is slowly, tantalisingly revealed, in flashbacks, fragments, digressions and stories within stories, narrated in majestic Ondaatjean style. -- Ian Sansom * New Statesman *
In Warlight we have a writer who knows exactly what he’s doing – and has constructed something of real emotional and psychological heft, delicate melancholy and yet, frequently, page-turning plottiness. I haven’t read a better novel this year. -- Sam Leith * Daily Telegraph *
The latest novel from the author of The English Patient is just glorious... rendered with Dickensian verve.My hot tip for the Booker Prize. -- Allison Pearson * Harpers Bazaar *
Ondaatje’s first novel in seven years mesmerizes from start to finish. -- Hephzibah Anderson * Mail on Sunday *
I spend the months before the publication of a new Michael Ondaatje novel trying to keep my expectations in check, telling myself it's simply unfair to expect as much of any writer as I expect from Ondaatje. Then he pulls off a Warlight, and I'm embarrassed by my own lack of faith... [Warlight] is surprising, delightful, heartbreaking and written as only Ondaatje could write it. -- Kamila Shamsie * Observer *
Compulsively and grippingly readable. In fact I read it first at a gallop, enthralled by the image of a city and a world distorted and all but destroyed by war, and then again slowly, determined to savour the details and extract as much as I could from it. Much remained puzzling on this second reading, but two things are clear: Michael Ondaatje is a marvellous writer, and Warlight is a novel which will continue to play in the reader’s imagination. -- Allan Massie * Scotsman *
Ondaatje [is] such a thrilling writer… I loved [Warlight]. -- Johanna Thomas-Corr * Evening Standard *