Book review: Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

Warlight
By Michael Ondaatje
McClelland & Stewart

The latest novel by Michael Ondaatje returns to the Second World War, a time he brilliantly illuminated in The English Patient, his 1992 novel which this summer won the Golden Man Booker Prize as the best of all Booker Prize-winning novels.
While The English Patient took place in Italy and North Africa, Warlight takes place in the decade just after the war in London. Two teenagers, Rachel and Nathaniel, are left behind by their parents, who move mysteriously to Singapore. They’re left in the care of a man they call The Moth, a man with an interesting cast of friends who take the children under their wing.
Later, their mother returns, under even more mysterious circumstances, with no sign of their father. As Nathaniel grows up, he tries to piece together his past to make sense of his teenage years.
Warlight is a complex story, in which nothing is quite as it seems. It’s a mystery, a spy story, a coming-of-age story and a tale of family bonds, but it’s not a novel that easily fits into any of those boxes. Ondaatje takes readers into the shadows of memory and time, occasionally bringing us into the conversation, but at other times leaving the details to our imaginations.
Warlight is beautifully written novel with a story that is exquisitely told by Ondaatje.
Tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book review: The Possible World by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

The Possible World
By Liese O’Halloran Schwarz
Simon and Schuster

This novel brings together three seemingly disconnected stories – an emergency room doctor, an elderly woman in a care home and a young boy suffering with anxiety – and brings them together in a complex and compelling story.
Lucy is the ER doc, who finds herself newly single as she works a gruelling night shift schedule. Ben is the young boy, who witnesses a brutal murder and appears to have amnesia due to the shock. Clare is the elderly woman, who might be the oldest person in her small town at nearly 100 years old, but who also appears to have no evidence of her birthdate.
This is not a murder mystery – the perpetrator becomes known quite quickly and simply after the crime. Rather, it is a story of life – three lives to be exact – and how people can form connections and how they can lose those same connections.
O’Halloran Schwarz is an emergency-medicine doctor herself, working in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Readers will recognize the accuracy in her descriptions of what it’s like to work an ER, including one hilarious scene that is sure to surprise.
Not only did The Possible World make this reviewer laugh, it also made me cry in its universal wisdom about the bonds between us and how ephemeral or enduring they can be. A beautifully written novel, The Possible World is a story that will enrich its readers.
Tracy.sherlock@gmail.com