Running in the Family

In the late 1970s, Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient , returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. Recording his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that “pendant off the ear of India,” Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. It is a story of broken engagements and drunken suicide attempts, of parties where exquisitely dressed couples tango in the jungle, a tale whose actors pursue lives of Baudelairean excess with impeccable decorum. Lyrical and witty, tragic and deliriously romantic, Running in the Family is an inspired marriage of travel narrative and family memoir by one of our most eloquent and poetic writers.