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  • Published: 25 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448103850
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384

The Cat's Table




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: 25 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448103850
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384

About the author

Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje is the author of several novels, as well as a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry. Among his many Canadian and international recognitions, his novel The English Patient won the 1992 Man Booker Prize, was adapted into a multi-award winning Oscar movie, and was awarded the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018; Anil’s Ghost won the Giller Prize, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and the Prix Médicis; and Warlight was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto.

Also by Michael Ondaatje

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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

Extraordinary

Guardian

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

The Times

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

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

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

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

Christine Dwyer Hickey, Irish Times, Books of the Year

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

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

The Economist

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

Wondrous

Financial Times