Staff Pick
Ondaatje's gorgeous story of postwar Britain is told with just enough information to keep you hanging on. Nathaniel's mother deserts him and his sister to work in the war effort, and that desertion is the through-line that lives inside Nathaniel for the rest of his life. Despite her silence and his frustration with no answers, he is determined to unravel his mother's story. Ondaatje explores themes of abandonment, secrecy, trust, loss, and childhood, but he withholds as much as he shares; there are no perfectly tied-up ends here. Beautifully written, Warlight is a story of how lives can be damaged beyond repair, and how practically impossible it is to live with that damage. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
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 read the story of fourteen-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.