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The Cat's Table audiobook cover art

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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 mercury.

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Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient.

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Anil Tissera is a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to work with local Sri Lankan officials to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. Bodies are discovered. Skeletons. And particularly one, nicknamed "Sailor". What follows is a story about love, family, and identity, about the unknown enemy and the quest to unlock the hidden past - all propelled by a riveting mystery.

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The English Patient audiobook cover art

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With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminates this audiobook like flashes of heat lightening.

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In the 1970s in Northern California, near Gold Rush country, a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is riven by an incident of violence that sets fire to the rest of their lives.

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Publisher's Summary

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India", Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.

©1982 Michael Ondaatje (P)2017 Audible, Inc.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

A deep stream...

I read this book in print many years ago, and never forgot it. When it became available on Audible, read by Ondaatje himself, I jumped on it. His reading opens quite another dimension of the book - I feel that now I can hear the voice at its heart. I remembered many images from my earlier reading - strange, ironic, often amusing - and not so amusing - vignettes from his family's story. Now I hear them again in a fresh - and in a sense a truer - light, as the author is reading.
Listening to this book is like drinking from a deep spring - something I find with all of Ondaatje's books and poems. Nourishing, inspiring, and something to keep close at hand for the duration.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

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  • Earnest
  • 07-30-18

Evocative, sad and elusive search for Family

Having just listened to Warlight, whose melancholy, painterly landscapes I grasped for a moment, then lost as they slipped away, I went searching for more insight.
This memoir was it.
Inchoate families abound as do children who attempt to live within them. As respectfully as possible, the author daubs another shape shifting canvas with a family fragment here, a story there and always, a heart rending use of language to paint it in.
There could not be a dry eye as one after another of the outlines of a Father not known melt away amidst time and memory.