Regular price: $14.95

Membership details Membership details
  • A 30-day trial plus your first audiobook, free.
  • 1 credit/month after trial – good for any book, any price.
  • Easy exchanges – swap any book you don’t love.
  • Keep your audiobooks, even if you cancel.
  • After your trial, Audible is just $14.95/month.
OR
In Cart

People who bought this also bought...

Warlight audiobook cover art

  • Warlight

  • By: Michael Ondaatje
  • Narrated by: Steve West
  • Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars 564
  • Performance
    4.5 out of 5 stars 518
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars 516

In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself - shadowed and luminous at once - we follow the story of 14-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.

  • 5 out of 5 stars

  • Instant favorite

  • By R. Hughes on 06-10-18
The Cat's Table audiobook cover art

  • The Cat's Table

  • By: Michael Ondaatje
  • Narrated by: Michael Ondaatje
  • Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars 377
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars 320
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars 315

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.

  • 5 out of 5 stars

  • Superb - But Not For All Readers or All Situations

  • By Amanda on 11-25-11
In the Skin of a Lion audiobook cover art

  • In the Skin of a Lion

  • By: Michael Ondaatje
  • Narrated by: Tom McCamus
  • Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    3.5 out of 5 stars 252
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars 234
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars 235

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.

  • 5 out of 5 stars

  • Superb

  • By Joshua on 02-25-18
Anil's Ghost audiobook cover art

  • Anil's Ghost

  • By: Michael Ondaatje
  • Narrated by: Alan Cumming
  • Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars 153
  • Performance
    4.5 out of 5 stars 89
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars 91

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.

  • 4 out of 5 stars

  • unlikely poetry

  • By jayne on 04-30-08
The English Patient audiobook cover art

  • The English Patient

  • By: Michael Ondaatje
  • Narrated by: Christopher Cazenove
  • Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars 427
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars 322
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars 329

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.

  • 4 out of 5 stars

  • If only there was a pause between chapters

  • By Jennifer Bould on 10-22-16
Divisadero audiobook cover art

  • Divisadero

  • By: Michael Ondaatje
  • Narrated by: Hope Davis
  • Length: 8 hrs
  • Unabridged
  • Overall
    3.5 out of 5 stars 133
  • Performance
    4.5 out of 5 stars 52
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars 54

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.

  • 5 out of 5 stars

  • I loved this

  • By Robin Dreyer on 01-12-10

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.

What members say

Average Customer Ratings

Overall

  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    11
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    3
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Performance

  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    12
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    2
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Story

  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    10
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    3
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Audible.com Reviews
Audible.co.uk reviews
Amazon Reviews
Sort by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    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

Sort by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars
  • 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.