Anil's Ghost - Michael Ondaatje

Winning a Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, the Kiriyama
Pacific Rim Book Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Anil's Ghost is another award-winning novel from Michael Ondaatje.

Steeped in centuries of cultural achievement
and tradition, Sri Lanka has been ravaged in the late twentieth century by bloody
civil war.Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka
but educated in England and the U.S., is sent by an international human rights group
to participate in an investigation into suspected mass political murders in her homeland.
Working with an archaeologist, she discovers a skeleton whose identity takes Anil
on a fascinating journey that involves a riveting mystery. What follows, in a novel
rich with character, emotion, and incident, is a story about love and loss, about
family, identity and the unknown enemy. And it is a quest to unlock the hidden past-like a handful of soil analyzed by an archaeologist, the story becomes more diffuse
the farther we reach into history.

A universal tale of the casualties of war, unfolding
as a detective story, the book gradually gives way to a more intricate exploration
of its characters, a symphony of loss and loneliness haunted by a cast of solitary
strangers and ghosts. The atrocities of a seemingly futile, muddled war are juxtaposed
against the ancient, complex and ultimately redemptive culture and landscape of Sri
Lanka.