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ratings: ★★★★★ (5/5)
Genre: Literary Fiction / Historical Fiction

Book Review:
Michael Ondaatje's Warlight is a stunning, atmospheric masterpiece that confirms his place as one of the greatest living writers in the English language. Set in the eerie, damaged landscape of postwar London, it tells the story of Nathaniel and Rachel, teenagers abandoned by their parents in 1945 and left in the care of a shadowy group of strangers—including the enigmatic ''The Moth,'' a man whose connections to dog-racing, smuggling, and espionage slowly reveal themselves. Years later, Nathaniel pieces together the truth about his mother's secret life, uncovering a story of love, betrayal, and sacrifice that rewrites everything he thought he knew. Ondaatje's prose is simply breathtaking: the Observer calls it ''vigorous and wonderfully serene,'' the New Yorker ''eloquent, oblique, witty, full of light and feeling.'' Annie Proulx praises him as ''a master of literary craft,'' and Aleksandar Hemon goes further, calling him ''the greatest living writer in the English language'' whose work ''restores belief in the beauty and power of literature and, by extension, of humanity.'' Warlight is a book to be savored, to be read slowly, to be reread. It will break your heart and mend it again. Essential.