Warlight

A Novel

By: Michael Ondaatje

Narrated by: Steve West

Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of The English Patient: a mesmerizing new novel that tells a dramatic story set in the decade after World War II through the lives of a small group of unexpected characters and two teenagers whose lives are indelibly shaped by their unwitting involvement.

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, 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.

©2018 Michael Ondaatje (P)2018 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"London-born narrator Steve West effortlessly mixes tones of mystery, uncertain memory, sophistication, and innocence in Ondaatje's latest novel.... A wholly original listening experience." (AudioFile)

“Warlight is a quiet new masterpiece from Michael Ondaatje… An elegiac thriller [with] the immediate allure of a dark fairy tale. In Warlight, all is illuminated, at first dimly then starkly, but always brilliantly.” (Anna Mundow, The Washington Post)

“If writers are cartographers of the heart, Michael Ondaatje’s oeuvre could fill an atlas...[he] evokes a kaleidoscope of ideas and moods with exquisite lyricism... Warlight is an intricate ballet of longing and deception, and a singular ode to the mother-child bond .” (Hamilton Cain, O Magazine)