Northern California. A farmer and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work the land with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who lives with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until they are riven by an incident of violence — of both hand and heart — that ‘sets fire to the rest of their lives’.

Anna will come to rest in the landscape of south-central France. There, she delves into the story of a writer who, decades earlier, lived in the isolated house she now occupies — a story that circles around the ‘raw truth’ of her own life, the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. And while Anna’s story lies at the heart of the novel, the narrative sweeps across the terrain of the lives of Coop and Claire as well, each of them managing to find some foothold
in a present rough-hewn from the past.

This is a story of possession and loss, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. Written in the sensuous prose for which Michael ondaatje’s fiction is celebrated, Divisadero is the work of a master story-teller.

Michael Ondaatje is the author of four previous novels, a memoir, a non-fiction book on film and eleven books of poetry. His novel The English Patient won the Booker Prize and was made into a multi oscar-winning film; another of his novels, Anil’s Ghost, won the Irish Times international Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Medicis. Born in Sri Lanka, he now lives in Toronto.