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The Cat's Table
  • Published: 1 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099554424
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $28.00

The Cat's Table

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 July 2012
EBook
25 Aug 2011
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From the acclaimed author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion: a stunningly beautiful and moving new novel about a boy's life-changing journey from Ceylon to England in the 1950s.


From the acclaimed author of The English Patient comes a stunningly beautiful novel about a boy's life-changing journey from Ceylon to England in the 1950s.

What had there been before such a ship in my life? A dugout canoe on a river journey? A launch in Trincomalee harbour? There were always fishing boats on our horizon. But I could never imagine the grandeur of this castle that was to cross the sea.


In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a huge liner in Colombo bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the lowly 'cat's table' , as far from the Captain's table as can be, with a ragtag group of adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship crosses the Indian Ocean the boys tumble from one adventure to another, and at night they spy on a shackled prisoner, his crime and fate a mystery that will haunt them forever...
  • Published: 1 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099554424
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $28.00
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About the author

Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje is the author of seven novels; a memoir, Running in the Family; a non-fiction book on film, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film; and several books of poetry, including The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting. The English Patient received the Booker Prize in 1992 and the Golden Man Booker in 2018, and was made into a film directed by Anthony Minghella. Anil’s Ghost was awarded the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize and the Prix Médicis. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto.

portrait photo of Michael Ondaatje

Also by Michael Ondaatje

A Year of Last Things
Warlight
The Distance of a Shout: Selected Poems
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
Coming Through Slaughter
Running in the Family
The English Patient
See all

Praise for The Cat's Table

Atmospheric, elegiac and at times, like Ondaatje's most famous novel, The English Patient, unbearably poignant

Sebastian Shakespeare, Tatler

It's impossible to explain through any discussion of plot and character the hypnotic brilliance of The Cat's Table. The joy of boyhood and the darkness at its edges are conveyed in sense of extraordinary imagination... It is entirely...well, Ondaatje-esque

Kamila Shamsie, Guardian, Books of the Year

Vividly follows the passage from Ceylon to England of an 10 year-old boy on a line full of eccentric, mysterious passengers

Ann Saddlemyer, Irish Times, Books of the Year

Ondaatje's prose, flawless as ever, deals with loneliness, friendship and pre-pubescent love

Christine Dwyer Hickey, Irish Times, Books of the Year

Wondrous

Financial Times

Superbly poised between the magic of innocence and the melancholy of experience

The Economist

Grave and playful at the same time, beautifully written and moving

The Times

One of the most admirable and enthralling literary novels of the year

Daily Mail

Part memoir, complete masterpiece... Written with tenderness, wisdom and sharp emotional recall, this is an exuberant elegy to innocence

Maggie Fergusson, Intelligent Life

Extraordinary

Guardian

Michael Ondaatje's impressive new novel, containing dreams and fantasy between a ship's flanks...is, in the most etymological way, a wonderful novel: one full of wonders

Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph

I love this book: the boys running wild on the long sea voyage, the slow revelation of the adult world they don't fully understand, the loss of the past and the beginning of the future, and even a sort of thriller in there! And the beauty of the sentences. Perfection

Salman Rushdie