From the celebrated author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion comes a remarkable new novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time.

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—of both hand and heart—that sets fire to the rest of their lives.

Divisadero takes us from the city of San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada’s casinos and eventually to the landscape of south-central France. It is here, outside a small rural village, that Anna becomes immersed in the life and the world of a writer from an earlier time—Lucien Segura. His compelling story, which has its beginnings at the turn of the century, circles around “the raw truth” of Anna’s own life, the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. And as the narrative moves back and forth in time and place, we discover each of the characters managing to find some foothold in a present rough hewn from the past.

Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, Divisadero is a multilayered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. It is Michael Ondaatje’s most intimate and beautiful novel to date.

"'Davis (American Splendor) reads Ondaatje's puzzle of a novel delicately, as if hesitant to jostle a single piece out of place. Often playing emotionally frazzled characters on screen, Davis is far more understated here in offering up Ondaatje's hybrid narrative — one that goes from 1970s San Francisco to early 20th-century France, linking past and present with loose tendrils of memory and history. She does a fine job with the tricky French names and nomenclature, and puts her natural gifts as an actor to good use with her subtle, understated, well-oiled reading. Davis still sounds as no-nonsense as ever, but her skilled reading offers a good deal more patience and tenderness than her often-testy characters do. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 16). (June)' Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

“All of Michael Ondaatje’s novels bear the unmistakable signature of a fine poet’s turn to fiction. The spare erotics and lucid passions of Divisadero engage readers first and last through Ondaatje’s supple and resonant gifts with language, syntax and style, in the service of stories and voices that resonate far beyond the page . . . Ondaatje shows us once again how and why our contemporary poets and novelists are held in such high regard.”

Neil Besner, Winnipeg Free Press

“My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje. I began Divisadero as soon as it came into my possession and over the course of a few evenings was captivated by Ondaatje’s finest novel to date . . . Divisadero is a deeply ordered, full-bodied work, illuminating both what it means to belong to a family and what it means to be alone in the world . . . Like Nabokov, another master of twinning, Ondaatje’s method is deliberate but discreet, and it was only in rereading this beautiful book–which I wanted to do as soon as I finished it–that the intricate play of doubles was revealed. Every sign of the author’s genius is here: the searing imagery, the incandescent writing, the calm probing of life’s most turbulent and devastating experiences. No one writes as affectingly about passion, about time and memory, about violence, subjects that have shaped Ondaatje’s previous novels. But there is a greater muscularity to Divisadero, an intensity born from its restraint. Episodes are boiled down to their essential elements, distilled but dramatic, resulting in a mosaic of profound dignity, with an elegiac quietude that only the greatest of writers can achieve.”

Jhumpa Lahiri, Amazon.com

“Ravishing and intricate . . . Few experiences in contemporary fiction are as sensual and absorbing as making one’s way through the pages of an Ondaatje novel. And there is a different, a deeper delight in going through his books a second time to see the secret stitching . . . The question that insistently haunts these elliptical and delicate works is how much their very beauty takes us away from the wars and scenes of great pain they describe, and to what extent, in courting art, they leave real life behind. Divisadero is an epic of intimate moments . . . The book is, among other things, a parable of contemporary America . . . When people call Ondaatje a poetic novelist, they are referring in part, of course, to his rare gift for language and observation. A scene of a boy on a runaway horse during an eclipse is as astonishing and hallucinatory as any such passage I can remember reading. Yet the deeper aspect of his poetic background is that his narratives proceed with the interlaced complexity of a long lyric poem . . . Part of the special delight of reading one of his books comes from the impression we get of a deeply curious traveler opening his worn suitcase and letting all the exotic bric-a-brac he’s collected on his journeys tumble out . . . Each of the romances in the book is gorgeous and singular in its effects . . . Ondaatje’s ability to fashion scenes that are at once exact and suggestive accounts not only for the sensual tingle of the books, but also for their literary pleasures . . . There is always a clear and unhurried spaciousness to Ondaatje’s paragraphs; they proceed with the deliberation and hush of a work of meditation, even while turning their attention to things of the secular world . . . Divisadero extends the liberating and original territory of that earlier triumph [The English Patient] so unforgettably that it’s hard, on finishing, not to turn back to the opening page and start all over.”

Pico Iyer, New York Review of Books

“It’s Ondaatje’s singular achievement to explore the heavy costs and burdens of colliding human lives with a lightness of touch and clarity of vision that makes for dead-run compelling reading . . . This novel everywhere offers evidence of a writer so entirely poised in his arrangements that he can move the action and interior lives of his characters wherever and whenever he pleases . . . Gorgeous.”

Randy Boyagoda, National Post

“The bewitching, assured Divisadero is the perfect reminder of why Ondaatje deserves to be honoured with his global peers . . . Ondaatje [has] maestro-like control and [a] page-turning plot. In the novel’s final pages, the genius of this multi-layered, multi-perspective approach fully reveals itself.”

Rachel Giese, CBC Book Review

“Divisadero has the ensemble qualities of early Robert Altman films and the poetic intensity of Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre, all rendered in Ondaatje’s characteristically poetic style . . . [It] is a story full of perfect shots and passionate performances . . . What holds [the] many narratives in check is the fluidity of Ondaatje’s masterly writing.”

Omar Majeed, Montreal Gazette

From the Hardcover edition.

“Page for page, Divisadero is an exhilarating read . . . The rise and fall of every well-turned sentence could be set to music, and his writing has a vivid physicality.”

Ella Taylor, LA Weekly

“Michael Ondaatje is the Canadian William Faulkner, writing novels that are visually unforgettable, stylistically inimitable, utterly devoted to the rise and fall of the human heart . . . In his new novel, he remains true to form . . . Compelling and moving.”

Darryl Whetter, Vancouver Sun

“An exquisitely realized novel . . . The most soulful writers, like the great jazz musicians, will keep finding new ways to play the same gorgeous notes again and again. Michael Ondaatje’s voice–his prismatic perspective on time and memory, on the elegiac repetitions of life–is so particular and distinctive that you can spot it at 20 yards . . . Divisadero is a haunting, meticulously conceived novel . . . [It has] the texture of a hand-woven tapestry . . . Ondaatje is a master at constructing breathtaking passages dropped in as casually as stars in a night sky.”

Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe

“Ondaatje knows the value of dramatic action and strong, sympathetic characters, and is working at his peak in this book.”

David Walton, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

“Divisadero is powered by narrative force and contains finely chiseled characters. [It] is also a book profuse with poetic imagery, profound themes and the delicate architecture of open verse . . . Stunning bits of lyrical observation turn up on almost every page . . . Breathtaking.”

John Barron, Chicago Sun-Times

“A mesmerizing saga . . . Ondaatje has woven a tale of loves lost and families sundered in a brilliantly poetic voice–a tale that lingers long after its telling.”

Deborah Donovan, Bookpage

“Emotionally riveting . . . Challenge[s] readers to uncover subtle but explosive links between past and present . . . Divisadero delivers Ondaatje’s trademark seductive prose, quixotic characters and psychological intricacy.”

Publishers Weekly

“[Divisadero has] a heck of an opening. And Ondaatje delivers on the promise of that beginning . . . His poetical skills are much in evidence in this novel . . . He’s prodigiously talented, conjuring richly detailed scenes with a minimum of words . . . Beautiful and haunting.”

Soyia Ellison, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Ondaatje’s prose is breathtaking . . . Divisadero is his most beautiful [novel] . . . I look forward to several returns to this luminous book by one of our most thoughtful and erudite writers.”

Charlotte Gray, Ottawa Citizen

“A heart-wrenching story about a tight-knit family that’s shattered forever by one pivotal event . . . Divisadero has been called Ondaatje’s most accessible novel, perhaps because it's about the universal subject of family . . . Ondaatje’s writing is evocative, powerful and deeply intimate. The reader can't help but care about all of the characters.”

Paula Arab, Calgary Herald

“Divisadero is a river of images and scenes that flows through the characters’ lives like fate. So, reader, embark and journey in awe of this river master . . . Divisadero is alive, pulsing and irreducible . . . Wonders and genius [have] shaped this design . . . It is a collage, though never random, which artfully revisions the temporal into a masterpiece that will permanently affect the reader.”

Mary Jo Anderson, Chronicle Herald (Halifax)

"Comparisons of Ondaatje to Faulkner and García Márquez are apt. His sense of time, like theirs, is one of curling, recurring flow . . . Divisadero finds Ondaatje in familiar form, which is to say eloquent, finely tuned form . . . [It] wends a crooked path, which is part of its great magic and beauty . . . The second part of the novel moves supplely from one character to another. Along the way come many gorgeous passages, many dreamlike sequences . . . Ondaatje is a very sexy writer and understands well the ins and outs of the courtly-love relationship . . . Ondaatje has always been a real craftsman, spending his one true commodity, time, with the utmost patience and care.”

–Jon Raymond, Bookforum

“Magnificent . . . Ondaatje pulls off the plotlines masterfully . . . He introduces memorable characters [and] scenes of majestic texture and captivating imagery . . . From its first to last telling sentence, this aesthetic tale, poetic with human detail, is a rare and precious pleasure.”

Don Oldenburg, USA Today