Running in the Family

Ondaatje, the Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient, was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to a privileged, highly eccentric family of mixed Dutch, Sinhalese, and Tamil ancestry.  His parents separated, and he left Ceylon when he was eleven, eventually settling in Canada.  In this book, he describes returning, almost twenty-five years later to sort out the recollected fragments of experience, legend, and family scandal, and to reconstruct the relationship of his parents set against the background of a colonial empire in decline.