In the skin of a lion

A young man from the Canadian back country moves to Toronto and becomes involved with two actresses, experiencing love, despair and, eventually, compulsion to commit a violent act. ``A spellbinding writer, Ondaatje exhibits a poet's sensibility and care for the precise, illuminating word,'' praised PW . (November) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In the Canadian wilderness, early in this century, Patrick Lewis grows up a child apart. Some time later in Toronto, an immigrant worker, suspended beneath the bridge he is helping to build, rescues from mid-air a nun swept away by the wind. The paths of these three people eventually cross, with explosive results. Born in Sri Lanka and now living in Canada, Ondaatje writes feelingly of the immigrant experience. That experiencethe ethnic mix, the battle against nature, the battle of worker against exploitationis familiar in outline but subtly different in detail because of the Canadian setting and Ondaatje's particular gifts. A fine poet, he gives us a series of piercing, beautifully controlled passages. If the novel finally spins out of controlepisodic, it seems not so much to resolve as dissolveit remains evocative throughout. Highly recommended for readers of serious fiction. Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal'' (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A lyric and sometimes surreal novel by the Canadian poet and writer Ondaatje (author of the remarkable poetry volume The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 1974; and the novel about Buddy Bolden, Coming through Slaughter, 1977) that may remind readers of certain of the more captivating aspects of, say, Ragtime. Ondaatje's setting is Toronto and environs from pre-WW I years up to 1938, and his emerging (but not only) theme is the labor and union movement among immigrant workers. In segments that read much like stories themselves, the reader meets a boy named Patrick Lewis, whose father is a dynamiter for lumber companies in backwoods Canada, then follows Patrick as he later goes to big-city Toronto and becomes (in 1924) a ""searcher"" for the missing capitalist and ruthless millionaire Ambrose Small. As part of his search--conducted (as is the whole of the book) amid a pleasurable wealth of period atmosphere and detail--Patrick meets and falls in love with Ambrose Small's actress-mistress, Clara Dickens; and then, when Clara Dickens ""must"" return to the somewhere-still-existing Small (in one of the novel's more surreal sections), Patrick falls in love with Clara's best friend, Alice Gull. The reader will learn in time that Alice is in fact the nun who was thought to have disappeared after falling from a new bridge back in 1917 (though in fact she was caught in mid-air by an immigrant worker), and, in her new incarnation as actress and lover, she will seek to radicalize Patrick Lewis, who himself now works as a laborer for the city's vast and grandiose new waterworks project. The radicalizing will succeed, though something terrible will happen to Alice, and, in between, there will be side stories--colorful, imagistic, and often lovely--about union martyrs and labor pioneers. If there are flaws here, they lie in the minor hints of a history-lesson tendentiousness, but a poetically energized grace and a perfected and rich inventiveness remain the greater marks of this talented writer. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

An April night in 1917. Harris and Pomphrey were on the bridge, in the dark wind. Pomphrey had turned west and was suddenly stilled. His hand reached out to touch Harris on the shoulder, a gesture he had never made before. -- Look! Walking on the bridge were five nuns. Past the Dominion Steel castings wind attacked the body directly. The nuns were walking past the first group of workers at the fire. The bus, Harris thought, must have dropped them off near Castle Frank and the nuns had, with some confusion at that hour, walked the wrong way in the darkness. They had passed the black car under the trees and talking cheerfully stepped past the barrier into a landscape they did not know existed -- onto a tentative carpet over the piers, among the night labourers. They saw the fire and the men. A few tried to wave them back. There was a mule attached to a wagon. The hiss and jump of machines made the ground under them lurch. A smell of creosote. One man was washing his face in a barrel of water. The nuns were moving towards a thirty-yard point on the bridge when the wind began to scatter them. They were thrown against the cement mixers and steam shovels, careering from side to side, in danger of going over the edge. Some of the men grabbed and enclosed them, pulling leather straps over their shoulders, but two were still loose. Harris and Pomphrey at the far end looked on helplessly as one nun was lifted up and flung against the compressors. She stood up shakily and then the wind jerked her sideways, scraping her along the concrete and right off the edge of the bridge. She disappeared into the night by the third abutment, into the long depth of air which held nothing, only sometimes a rivet or a dropped hammer during the day. Then there was no longer any fear on the bridge. The worst, the incredible had happened. A nun had fallen off the Prince Edward Viaduct before it was even finished. The men covered in wood shavings or granite dust held the women against them. And Commissioner Harris at the far end stared along the mad pathway. This was his first child and it had already become a murderer. Excerpted from In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.