Mapped
Anil's Ghost
Michael Ondaatje
Ondaatje's Sri Lanka is a country under the pressure of civil war in the late 1980s and early 1990s, seen through a forensic investigation. The map runs from the capital, Colombo, up the central axis to the ancient Buddhist ruins and monasteries of the north-central plain and out to the tea-country hills, where the war's disappearances surface as bones.
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In the Skin of a Lion
Michael Ondaatje
Ondaatje's luminous novel gives back the immigrant workers written out of the making of Toronto in the 1910s and 1920s, following Patrick Lewis among the men who built the city's bridges and waterworks. The real Toronto is its stage: the great Bloor Street Viaduct rising over the Don Valley, the immigrant tanning district, the perilous tunnel dug out under Lake Ontario, and the cathedral-like waterworks that R.C. Harris built to purify the city's water.
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The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje
The frame of the novel is a bombed-out villa in the Tuscan hills as the war in Italy ends: a nurse, a burned man, a thief and a sapper hold together in the ruins of a former nunnery above Florence. The map centres on Villa San Girolamo at Fiesole and the city below, and reaches out to the Egyptian and Libyan desert the patient remembers.
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