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Andrew Daily, May 10, 2007

Ondaatje's "The English Patient", winner of the Booker Prize and adapted into a wildly popular (and unfairly melodramatic) movie, is his best known and most popular novel. Those who have come to love his prose, however, almost always point to "In the Skin of a Lion" as his greatest work.

It is in this book that we first meet Hannah, Hannah's father Patrick (only alluded to, in death, in "English Patient") and the thief Caravaggio. In spare, poetic prose, Ondaatje traces Patrick from his boyhood in a rural lumber camp through his life, loves, and eventual fatherhood in Toronto's immigrant community of the interwar period. In the process, through Patrick's loves, friends, job, and eventual desperate act, Ondaatje also weaves the story of Toronto's rise as a city, the joys and pains of its multi-ethnic working classes, and its history of radical politics.

"In the Skin of a Lion" is Ondaatje's finest book, and forms a pair with "The English Patient." It in truth lends "EP" a greater resonance and depth, filling in some of the allusions and passions that go unexplained in the latter novel.

It is my suspicion that Ondaatje won the Booker on the strength of this novel, and that the award to "EP" was to make up for the previous slight.

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