A Year of Last Things

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje returns to poetry, where he began his career over fifty years ago, and what a return it is.

Born in Sri Lanka during the Second World War, Ondaatje was sent as a child to school in London, and later moved to Canada. While he has lived here since, these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world – describing himself as a “mongrel,” someone born out of diverse cultures.

Here, rediscovering the influence of every border crossed, he moves back and forth in time, from a childhood in Sri Lanka to Moliere’s chair during his last stage performance, from icons in Bulgarian churches to the California coast and loved Canadian rivers, merging memory with the present, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss. At first sight it is a glittering collection of fragments and memories – but small, intricate pieces of a life are precisely what matter most to Ondaatje. They make an emotional history. As he writes in the opening poem: “Reading the lines he loves / he slips them into a pocket, / wishes to die with his clothes / full of torn freestanzas / and the telephone numbers / of his children in far cities”. Poetry – where language is made to work hardest and burns with a gem-like flame - is what Ondaatje has returned to in this intimate history.

'My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje'
JHUMPA LAHIRI, author of The Namesake

©2024 Michael Ondaatje (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • Extraordinarily attuned to hauntings… Ondaatje is a connoisseur – and creator – of atmospheres… Wonderful

    Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month*

  • Each new book of Michael Ondaatje’s is a literary event, but that is particularly true for his books of poetry. In A Year of Last Things he comes close to writing something like a timeless poem, “a memory poem” that reflects outside and inside time at the same moment, recording the mercurial, mysterious feeling of being alive. The poems become intimate, unresolved stories, loyal to feeling and presence, the lyricism of dreams applied to narratives of lives and landscapes. A Year of Last Things is a remarkable, incomparable new collection

    Terrance Hayes, author of So to Speak

  • Michael Ondaatje’s love of the world and its wonders, the kindness he offers, the elegant lyricism of his sentences, the joy of storytelling… restore belief in the beauty and power of literature and, by extension, of humanity

    Aleksandar Hemon, author of The Lazarus Project

  • Michael Ondaatje defies the normal distinction between poet and novelist. His writing is consistently tuned to a visionary pitch

    Graham Swift, author of Waterland

  • My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje

    Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake

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