Anil's Ghost

Following the phenomenal success of Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning third novel, The English Patient, expectations were almost insurmountable. The internationally acclaimed #1 bestseller had made Ondaatje the first Canadian novelist ever to win the Booker. Four years later, in 1996, a motion picture based on the book brought the story to a vast new audience. The film, starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, went on to win numerous prizes, among them nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Worldwide English-language sales of the book topped two million copies.
But in April 2000, Anil's Ghost was widely hailed as Ondaatje's most powerful and engrossing novel to date. Winning a Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and the Giller Prize, Anil's Ghost became an international bestseller. "Nowhere has Ondaatje written more beautifully," said The New York Times Book Review.
The...