Anil's Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje (used)

Anil's Ghost is Michael Ondaatje's fourth novel, and his first after The English Patient. It is set in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s and early 1990s, at the height of the civil war, when government forces, separatist rebels and insurgents in the south were all killing, and people were disappearing without trace.

Anil Tissera left the island at eighteen and trained abroad as a forensic anthropologist. Fifteen years later she comes home on a human rights mission, paired with Sarath Diyasena, a Sri Lankan archaeologist whose loyalties she cannot read. At an ancient burial site under government protection they find a skeleton that is far too recent to belong there. They call him Sailor. Proving who he was, and who killed him, could expose the state itself, and the investigation draws in Sarath's brother Gamini, an exhausted emergency-room doctor, and Ananda, a grieving artist who is asked to rebuild Sailor's face.

Ondaatje writes about the war through small, precise scenes rather than history lessons: bones, temples, hospital wards, the patience of forensic work. The novel won the Giller Prize and Canada's Governor General's Award in 2000.

Author: Michael Ondaatje
Publisher: Picador
Format: Paperback, 311 pages
Condition: Like new (second-hand)