Canadian author Michael Ondaatje is best known for his 1992 novel, The English Patient, which won the Booker Prize that year. In his latest novel, his first since 2000's Anil's Ghost, Ondaatje weaves a mesmerizing saga of closely-knit characters who suddenly and dramatically disperse, and are forced to reinvent themselves years and continents apart.

The novel opens with a bucolic scene—a farm in northern California in the 1970s—where a single father has raised two teenaged daughters, Anna and Claire, since birth. He is assisted by Coop, a boy a few years older than the girls—an orphan he informally adopted. Their peaceful life is fractured when the father discovers a doomed romance between Anna and Coop, and the ensuing violence propels them all onto different and solitary paths.

The reader next encounters Anna 18 years later in a small village in southern France. Now a literary archivist conducting research on Segura, a turn-of-the-century poet and novelist, she is still unable to escape the incident that "set fire to the rest of [her] life."

During these same years, Claire finds herself living two distinct lives: doing legal research in San Francisco during the week, then spending weekends with her father on the farm. The two live quietly there, always circling the episode that led to "the absence of Anna in their lives." While working on a case, Claire runs into Coop in Tahoe, and discovers he has lost all memory of "the incident" and has no desire to revisit his past.

The narrative then shifts to the life of the novelist Anna is studying in France. After leaving his own wife, Segura buys an abandoned farmhouse and "adopts" his own gypsy couple and their son Rafael. Decades after that, Anna stays in that farmhouse, and meets and loves Rafael—thus tying together two of many threads in this haunting and ever-spiraling story.

Ondaatje is also a poet; here he has woven a tale of loves lost and families sundered in a brilliantly poetic voice—a tale that lingers long after its telling.

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado. Copyright 2007 BookPage Reviews.

Both beautiful and baffling, Ondaatje's most recent novel (after 2000's Anil's Ghost ) opens with the portrait of a complex family suddenly imploding in the Northern California wilderness. Anna and Claire have been raised as sisters by Anna's father (both mothers died in childbirth), with a neighbor boy named Coop also in attendance, his family having been battered to death by a hired hand. Anna and Claire both have feelings for Coop, but it's Anna who enters into an affair with him, precipitating an act of violence that flings the family apart. Subsequent passages detail Coop's desperate gambling, Anna's isolation in distant France, Coop and Claire's chance meeting years later, and the family history of poet Lucien Segura, whose works Anna has been studying. These passage are evocatively and delicately rendered, but their connections aren't; the book falls apart into lovely pieces that the reader has a hard time collecting. Oddly, this sense of dislocation does not seem to be the point, for a sense of family connection reverberates faintly throughout despite the disjointed narrative. Of course, dedicated readers will want to investigate, but others may be confounded. For literary collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/07.]—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Ondaatje's oddly structured but emotionally riveting fifth novel opens in the Northern California of the 1970s. Anna, who is 16 and whose mother died in childbirth, has formed a serene makeshift family with her same-age adopted sister, Claire, and a taciturn farmhand, Coop, 20. But when the girls' father, otherwise a ghostly presence, finds Anna having sex with Coop and beats him brutally, Coop leaves the farm, drawing on a cardsharp's skills to make an itinerant living as a poker player. A chance meeting years later reunites him with Claire. Runaway teen Anna, scarred by her father's savage reaction, resurfaces as an adult in a rural French village, researching the life of a Gallic author, Jean Segura, who lived and died in the house where she has settled. The novel here bifurcates, veering almost a century into the past to recount Segura's life before WWI, leaving the stories of Coop, Claire and Anna enigmatically unresolved. The dreamlike Segura novella, juxtaposed with the longer opening section, will challenge readers to uncover subtle but explosive links between past and present. Ondaatje's first fiction in six years lacks the gut punch of Anil's Ghost and the harrowing meditation on brutality that marked The English Patient , but delivers his trademark seductive prose, quixotic characters and psychological intricacy. (June)

Davis (American Splendor ) reads Ondaatje's puzzle of a novel delicately, as if hesitant to jostle a single piece out of place. Often playing emotionally frazzled characters on screen, Davis is far more understated here in offering up Ondaatje's hybrid narrative—one that goes from 1970s San Francisco to early 20th-century France, linking past and present with loose tendrils of memory and history. She does a fine job with the tricky French names and nomenclature, and puts her natural gifts as an actor to good use with her subtle, understated, well-oiled reading. Davis still sounds as no-nonsense as ever, but her skilled reading offers a good deal more patience and tenderness than her often-testy characters do. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 16). (June)