Buy Now!From the celebrated author of
The English Patient and
In the Skin of a Lion comes a remarkable new novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time.
In
the 1970s in northern California, near Gold Rush country, a father and
his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help
of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is
a makeshift family, until it is riven by an incident of violence — of
both hand and heart — that sets fire to the rest of their lives.
Divisadero
takes us from the city of San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of
Nevada’s casinos, and eventually to the landscape of south central
France. It is here, outside a small rural village, that Anna becomes
immersed in the life and the world of a writer from an earlier time —
Lucien Segura. His compelling story, which has its beginnings at the
turn of the century, circles around “the raw truth” of Anna’s own life,
the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. And as the
narrative moves back and forth in time and place, we discover each of
the characters managing to find some foothold in a present rough-hewn
from the past.
Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters,
Divisadero
is a multi-layered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakable past,
about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. It is
Michael Ondaatje’s most intimate and beautiful novel to date.
