The Cat's Table
Michael Ondaatje
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...
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About Michael Ondaatje
Reviews for The Cat's Table
Daily Mail
Extraordinary
Guardian
Superbly poised between the magic of innocence and the melancholy of experience
The Economist
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
Atmospheric, elegiac and at times, like Ondaatje's most famous novel, The English Patient, unbearably poignant
Sebastian Shakespeare
Tatler
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 Wondrous
Financial Times
Part memoir, complete masterpiece... Written with tenderness, wisdom and sharp emotional recall, this is an exuberant elegy to innocence
Maggie Fergusson
Intelligent Life
Grave and playful at the same time, beautifully written and moving
The Times
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